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>y 2 New York State Education Department 



ADDRESSES BY ANDREW S. DRAPER LL.B. LL.D., 
COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION 



CONTENTS 

1 The Mayflower : Fore and Aft 3 

2 America's Educational Debt to the Dutch 26 

3 The University Presidency 37 

4 Address at the Inaugural Exercises of President James at 

the University of Illinois. 50 

5 Remarks at Southern Educational Conference, Columbia, 

S. C 55 

6 Synopsis of Remarks at State Teachers Association, 1905, 

at Syracuse, N. Y 58 

7 Inborn qualities in the Character of General Grant 60 

8 Factors in the Making of the Medical Profession 76 

9 Abstract of Remarks at New York State Grange, 1906, at 

Geneva, N. Y 88 

10 The Trend in American Education 90 



ALBANY 

NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 
I906 

D384m-My6«35°o ^ 



STATE OF NEW YORK 
EDUCATION DEPARTMENT , X 

Regents of the University n t\ ^ . s\* 

With years when terms expire . \ v r\ 0\ 

1913 Whitelaw Reid M.A. LL.D. Chancellor - - New York 
1917 St Clair McKelway M.A. L.H.D. LL.D. D.C.L. 

Vice Chancellor Brooklyn 

1908 Daniel Beach Ph.D. LL.D. Watkins 

1914 Pliny T. Sexton LL.B. LL.D. ------ Palmyra 

1912 T. Guilford Smith M.A. C.E. LL.D. - - - - Buffalo 

1907, William Nottingham M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. - - Syracuse 

1910 Charles A. Gardiner Ph.D. L.H.D. LL.D. D.C.L. New York 

1915 Albert Vander Veer M.D. M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. Albany 

191 1 Edward Lauterbach M.A. LL.D. New York 

1909 Eugene A. Philbin LL.B. LL.D. ----- New York 

1916 Lucian L. Shedden LL.B. ------- Plattsburg 

Commissioner of Education 

Andrew S. Draper LL.B. LL.D. 

Assistant Commissioners 

Howard J. Rogers M.A. LL.D. First Assistant 
Edward J. Goodwin Lit.D. L.H.D. Second Assistant 
Augustus S. Downing M.A. Pd.D. LL.D. Third Assistant 

Secretary to the Commissioner 

Harlan H. Horner B.A. 

Director of State Library 

Edwin H. Anderson M.A. 

Director of Science and State Museum 

John M. Clarke Ph.D. LL.D. 

Chiefs of Divisions 

Accounts, William Mason 
Attendance, James D. Sullivan 

Educational Extension 

Examinations, Charles F. Wheelock B.S. LL.D. 

Inspections, Frank H. Wood M.A. 

Law, Thomas E. Finegan M.A. 

School Libraries, Charles E. Fitch L.H.D. 

Statistics, Hiram C. Case 

Visual Instruction, DeLancey M. Ellis 



AUG 22 '91' 



THE MAYFLOWER : FORE AND AFT 

FOREFATHERS' ADDRESS, COOPER INSTITUTE, NEW YORK CITY I905 IN 
THE POPULAR LECTURE COURSE OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION 

Not much is certainly known concerning the architecture or the 
equipment of the Mayflower. Not even her name is mentioned in 
the original Pilgrim documents. No authentic description of her 
exists. It is surely known that she was of about 180 tons burden. 
The usual type of the English trading vessel of her day is ascer- 
tained. She was, of course, a wooden vessel. As certainly, she 
had sails and was propelled by wind. She was probably a " three- 
master." She must have been about 80 feet long, 22 or 23 feet 
wide and 11 or 12 feet deep. She was short and blocky as com- 
pared with our modern vessels. Doubtless she had relatively high 
decks, with cabins or staterooms, at the bow and stern, and a low 
deck in the middle, under which there were also cabins. We must 
forgive a young scapegrace by the name of Billington, who was one 
of the ship's famous company, for frightening everybody almost 
to death by firing off a blunderbuss in his father's cabin, when 
there was powder scattered about and a fire " between decks," 
because he unwittingly led Bradford to mention the cabin " between 
decks," and the fire, and the " many people " warming themselves, 
in the Governor's record. Very likely such kitchen conveniences 
as the vessel had, with storerooms, were under the main forward 
deck. She doubtless carried several relatively large guns on the 
spar deck amidships, with lighter ones astern, and probably one 
piece of larger caliber and longer range upon the forecastle. Of 
course she had several small boats and we know that the Pilgrims 
had a shallop stowed between the decks, which they had to cut 
down in order to bring along. 

Her captain's name was Jones. He probably had a compass box 
and hanging compass, for that instrument had been invented by 
an English cleric twelve years before, and Bradford refers to it. 
He could hardly have been without the crude maps of Cabot, Smith, 
Gosnold and other daring seamen, but he was without exact charts 
of the western waters. The ship carried the then new flag of 
the United Kingdom of England and Scotland, for it had been 
decreed fourteen years before by the son of the Queen of Scots 
upon coming to the English throne. It was the old flag of England 
upon the old flag of Scotland, the red cross of St George upon 



4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

the white cross of St Andrew. It was not the present flag of the 
United Kingdom, for since then the flag of Ireland, the cross of 
St Patrick, has been added. 

Very little is certainly known of the doings of the Mayflower 
either before or after her famous voyage. There is some confusion 
because her name was popular and was used by many English ves- 
sels. If a log of her great voyage was kept, as doubtless there was, 
it has been lost. We know that that voyage took sixty-seven days. 
The ship was so badly strained by storms that little sail was used. 
There was some alarm about safety. The ship returned from the 
new Plymouth to London in thirty-one days. Many of the Pilgrims 
were seasick and were taunted by a profane sailor who told them 
he hoped to throw half of them overboard before the journey 
was over and that then he would make merry with their goods. 
But before they were halfway over, the hardened wretch died with 
a " grievous disease " and was the first to go overboard. He went, 
accompanied by the Pilgrim opinion, in which we join, that it 
was " the just hand of God upon him." The ship was over- 
crowded, cold, wet and unhealthful. There was great physical 
discomfort as well as mental anxiety and heartbreaking recol- 
lections, through a surprisingly long and boisterous voyage. 

But the " fore and aft " is used not so much with reference to 
a vessel as to a history. The Mayflower in American thought is 
not so much a ship as an institution, not so much an instrument 
as a migration, and not so much a thing as a memory and an 
inspiration. The " fore and aft " of the Mayflower refers not 
merely to the bow and the stern of a ship no larger than we send 
every day to the fishing banks, but to the fore-warnings and the 
after-results of the not very large but very potential events which 
transferred the fathers of the Republic from the Old World to 
the New, and initiated a most astonishing, a most beneficent and 
an altogether resistless advance in the affairs of men. 

When this little crude and comfortless vessel reached a port 
and discharged her burden upon the New England coast she had 
made her name famous for all generations. She had brought over 
not only men and women whose character had been cast in heroic 
mold, but as their instrument she had brought also the founda- 
tion principles of a new and a better civilization. She opened up 
a new and a freer intellectual and moral outlook. She started a 
new scheme of government which would give the equal chance 
to every one. She initiated a movement which was to quicken 
the thinking and better the living of men and women for all time 
and in all quarters of the earth. 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 5 

The landing, Thursday, December 21 , 1620, made a red-letter 
day in the splendid and fascinating story of human progress. On 
that day the Anglo-Saxon race first got permanent foothold upon 
the great western world. Other great races had been in American 
waters and upon the American shores before. Civilization owes 
much to some of them ; but they came short in the qualities which 
impelled the Saxon stock to possess the land and dedicate it to 
such a freedom as the world had never known. Other Englishmen 
had been here before, but they had not been moved by the spirit 
of the Pilgrims. Jamestown was a dependency, not a colony. 
There was lack of wives and mothers and daughters at Jamestown. 
Jamestown was Cavalier in politics and Conformist in religion. 
Plymouth had even passed the outer gates of Puritanism into the 
realm of rebellion, separatism and independence. Jamestown bent 
the knee to the king, with thoughtless readiness, for the sake of 
his favors. Plymouth, with a more rational love for the motherland 
than a selfish spirit ever knew, quickly became a self-assertive, 
a self-governing colony, which would not only plant and water 
and enlarge English liberty in a wilderness but would save English 
liberty to the English realm itself. Jamestown was moved by the 
hope of gain ; Plymouth breathed the pure and inspiring spirit of 
unselfishness. One was weighted with the narrowing and doomed 
spirit of autocracy, and in the face of great undertakings melted 
away ; the other, uplifted by the invigorating spirit of democracy, 
gained the force and fiber and balance which are the best reward 
of men and women who struggle, conquered the new land, and 
laid down the great principles upon which free government must 
rest to be enduring. 

It is a singular and suggestive fact that the original home of 
the Pilgrims was lost to the world for near two hundred years. 
It was known that they came from Holland. Their names and their 
acts surely enough made them Englishmen. Scholars had every 
reason to believe that they came from somewhere in the eastern 
counties of England which lay against the North sea and had been 
most deeply stirred by the war for religious freedom against the 
Spaniards in the Netherlands. Those counties were for long years 
the storm centers of religious and political-religious turmoil in the 
kingdom. They developed the largest religious independence and 
supplied most of the English-Christian martyrs. Many from these 
counties had gone over to the continent for religious and political 
freedom. It was known that several colonies of these people had 
found their way to the Low Countries. It was natural to suppose 
that the Pilgrims came from that region, but for near two centuries 



6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

the Pilgrim story rested upon surmise alone. The thread of authen- 
tic history was broken and the ends seemed completely lost. 

They were found by accident. It was known to students that 
Governor Bradford had left behind him a history of the settlement 
of Plymouth. It had never been printed. The early writers re- 
ferred to it down to the year 1767. From that time all trace of 
it was gone. The historians spoke of it as lost, and guessed about 
what had become of it. The belief was common that when the 
British soldiers evacuated Boston in 1776 they carried the manu- 
script with them. In 1844 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, 
a very able man, published a book — which was but little read — 
entitled The History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America. 
It was only after ten more years that some quotations in this book 
touching Pilgrim history, which the writer said he had obtained 
from a manuscript found in the library of the Bishop of London, 
at Fulham, led some one to surmise that the manuscript was none 
other than the Bradford history. Investigation established the fact 
beyond a doubt. The priceless value of the unprinted book was 
not suspected by the eminent prelate in whose possession it was. 
But there it was, still in manuscript form, the only comprehensive 
and authentic account of the Pilgrim colony in the world. The 
Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1856, caused it to be copied 
.and published. Forty years later the original was generously, and 
with stately ceremonies, returned to Massachusetts by the English 
authorities through the fraternal offices of the English church and 
the gracious approval of the English Queen. 

The manuscript makes a book eleven and one half inches long, 
seven and one half inches wide, and one and one half inches thick. 
It has two hundred seventy pages. It is bound in parchment, once 
white but now brown and worn with age. It has been much 
scribbled upon by the irreverent children in the Bradford family. 
It is kept in a safe especially prepared for it in the State Library 
at Boston. The state of Massachusetts has rendered a distinct 
public service by publishing it in attractive form and selling it at 
a nominal price. No true American can ever read a transcript 
of this book but with absorbing interest and respect. None will 
ever look upon the original except with awe, for it must forever 
stand as the main source of information concerning the advance 
of the forefathers of the Republic from obscurity to the very 
pinnacle of world fame. 

This Bradford manuscript locates them at the opening of the 
seventeenth century at " Sundrie towns and villages, some of 
Nottinghamshire, some of Lincollinshire, and some of Yorkshire, 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 7 

where they border nearest together." Cotton Mather, in a sketch 
of Bradford, had mentioned that the latter was born at Ansterfield. 
There is no Ansterfield in England. The loss of the original manu- 
script and the turning of the u upside down in Mather's copy, 
had befogged inquirers for nearly two hundred years. No tradi- 
tion of the Pilgrim exodus could be found among the people o£ 
any English neighborhood. The Bradford manuscript recovered 
the trail. The " Sundrie towns and villages " were Scrooby r 
Austerfield, and Gainsborough, on or near the great post road 
from London to Edinburgh, now the main line of the Great 
Northern Railway. 

Now let us go back and see the conditions in England from 
1600 to 1620, out of which these people came. It was before the 
truth about the solar system had been accepted. The telescope 
was invented, and the first four satellites of Jupiter, the rings of 
Saturn, and the phases of Venus were discovered in these two 
decades. It was while our forefathers were in Holland that Galileo 
was punished by the Inquisition for saying that the earth was 
round and moved in space. Neither the barometer nor the 
mercurial thermometer was known. The circulation of the blood 
had not been discovered. There were no clocks with oscillating 
pendulums. It was sixty years before the discovery of the law 
of gravitation. Newton's Principia was presented to the Royal 
Society in 1686. There was no knowledge of the original or 
prismatic colors, and none of the progressive motion of light. It 
was more than a century before it was demonstrated that the 
surface of the earth has an orderly and geological stratification. 
No one thought of water being composed of oxygen and hydrogen 
gases. 

Life was monotonous, slow and serious at the opening of the 
seventeenth century. Few of the people could read and write- 
There were nobles who lacked that accomplishment. There were 
no free schools. Oxford and Cambridge, with here and there a 
fitting school for sons of noble birth, comprised the English school 
system for that and a much later time. Most of the people lived 
in cottages thatched with straw. There were no stoves : even- 
chimneys were practically unknown. Pewter dishes were aristo- 
cratic inventions which promised to drive out wooden ones. Table 
knives were beginning to assert themselves, but fingers did for 
forks many long years yet. There was no china, nor even tin- 
ware upon the table. The weaving was done by hand power. 
Friction matches were in the future. Looking-glasses were just 
beginning to come over from France to take the place of little 



8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

steel reflectors. Underclothing was not used. The queen had 
the monopoly of starch. There was not even a weekly paper in 
all England; and it was a full hundred years before there was 
a daily paper in London. There were 225,000 people in London 
but there was not a street light in the city for an hundred 
sixty years after this. There were no pavements, or water pipes, 
or sewage systems. Fires were not uncommon, but there were 
no fire engines. If one were afflicted by flame he did escape the 
rough hoof of a professional fire department. The conditions 
menaced health continually. There was lack of wooden floors and 
carpets ; the dirt floors were covered with rushes and the houses 
were often foul. Fens, forty or fifty miles long, reeked with 
miasm. Where the people gathered in towns the filth gathered 
also. Bathing was not common. Smallpox, measles and scarlet 
fever were thought all the same. The masses had no physicians. 
The death rate was one to twenty-three ; now it is one to forty. 
It was more than two hundred years before illuminating gas. before 
sails were aided by steam upon the high seas, before railroads, 
before portraiture by instantaneous processes, before cheap postage 
and prepayment by stamps. The forests were great and many 
and the roads very bad. The few letters were carried, at irregular 
intervals, on horseback, about five miles an hour and for a charge 
larger than a day's wages. When Elizabeth died it took three 
days and three hours to carry the news at top speed from London 
to York, 190 miles. There were no steam engines for any pur- 
pose. Of course, electricity had not touched life with its revo- 
lutionizing charm. In short, very little of the conditions of life 
of three hundred years ago remain to us save the land, and the 
sea, and the sky. 

It was the age of faith but not of reason. Moral sense was 
intense and at times dreadfully perverted. To put all the people 
of that day in one characterization would be as "much a mistake, 
of course, as to put all the people of our day in one class. There 
were four classes, viz, the sovereign, citizens, yeomen, and laborers. 
The larger the class the less control it had. Crimes were frequent 
and were terribly punished. There were more than two hundred 
offenses punishable by death. The sheriff was the principal officer 
of the crown. The gallows appeared at every turn in the king's 
highway. Gastly human heads were common sights on London 
bridge. Life was much more than austere. The pulpit was 
narrow and unrelenting. The stage was coarse. Sports were 
gross. Social standards were not what they are now. The great 
Elizabeth herself was both indelicate and profane in speech. It 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 9 

remained for a Puritan parliament to pass an act banishing any 
who would not promise to attend church, and later to resolve 
" That pictures in the royal galleries which contained pictures of 
Jesus and the Virgin Mother should be burned, and that Greek 
statues should be given over to Puritan stone-masons to be made 
decent." If it was the age of faith, it was quite as much the age 
of superstition. Ordinary happenings brought the most grievous 
omens. Witchcraft was common in Old England before it was 
in New England. It was believed that the end of the world was 
near. The common life, the ordinary thought, and the political 
institutions were impassable barriers to an intellectual advance. 

The religious revolutions produced armies which broke out the 
roads for the intellectual and political advance. Luther almost 
a century before had denounced the sway of the universal church 
and nailed his ninety-five theses upon the church door at Witten- 
berg. The world knows the result. Calvin gave the world his 
coldly logical and thought-provoking creed. All northern Europe 
was in a great religious strife. The' first great battle for religious 
toleration in the Low Countries was well advanced to its successful 
issue. It was a long and bloody one. The roar of the battle was 
heard in England and the heroisms of the Dutch inspired English- 
men. The English had stood for rights and fought battles them- 
selves before then. The refusal of the Pope to sanction the divorce 
of Henry the Eighth from Catharine years before had joined the 
resentment of the King to the tendencies of the people and made 
England a Protestant country. The Puritan armies were gathering 
for all that Puritanism now implies to us. 

If" the England of the beginning of the seventeenth century was 
ignorant and superstitious, it was by no means insipid. If the 
great Queen who had ruled more than forty years was as vain 
and voluptuous as her mother, Anne Boleyn, she was as daring 
and aggressive as her father, Henry the Eighth. If she lied, she 
held the exceedingly convenient theory that the word of a queen 
was not to be kept unless doing so would, as she viewed it, pro- 
mote the ends of the state. If she swore in a way to abash the 
troopers of her armies, she doubtless imagined that it had to be 
done and that whatever queens did they should do right royally. 
Any woman who in that day could gather three thousand fine 
gowns was not lacking in the spectacular or in impressiveness. 
Any woman who could govern her own kingdom completely, and 
at the same time half govern the kingdoms of France and Spain 
and Holland was not lacking in assurance, or in force, in sagacity 



IO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

or in statesmanship. Whatever else she was, she was a self-reliant, 
an undaunted, and a devoted English queen. 

And the people were not lacking in spirit, either. Their tradi- 
tions inspired them : the faith of their leaders made their acts 
sublime. Their history ran back to great deeds of arms. They 
had slender ideas of constitutional rights, but they knew what the 
Great Charters meant : their fathers had put their hands to the 
hilts of their lumbering old swords in the very presence of the 
king more than once, and they would do much more when Elizabeth 
was gone and a weaker monarch was in her place. The Almighty 
was stirring these hardy people. Men of genius were coming out 
of the common herd. Those were the years that produced Bacon 
and Spenser, Sidney and Hooker, Raleigh and Shakspere. The 
world was soon to know that it produced statesmen and military 
captains too. And it produced men who could follozv with terrific 
and fateful force, as well as men who could lead. 

Naturally the northern and eastern counties felt the quickening 
impulse first. Things are always moving in Scotland. There was 
much then doing in Scotland. John Knox had been preaching 
sermons and printing books and Andrew Lang had told James the 
Sixth that there were two kingdoms in Scotland and that although 
he was the king in one he was only a very ordinary member in 
the other. There was even more doing in Holland. There was 
much going and coming across the North sea, and it was telling 
upon the thought of the northeastern counties. Brave little Holland . 
had been fighting Spain and the Inquisition for thirty-five years. 
An hundred thousand of her sons had laid down their lives for 
religious liberty. But, thank God, she was succeeding. She was 
driving the tiger back to his lair. The dread work she had been 
doing in recovering her northern shores from old ocean and in 
driving the most dangerous military empire of a thousand years 
from her southern borders, was making great men and women. 
They were celebrating their victories by establishing free schools : 
they were setting up universities upon the little fringe of land 
they had recovered from the ocean and dedicated to freedom with 
their best blood. Religious freedom was bringing political free- 
dom. Political freedom was developing material resources and 
industrial capacity. The manufactures and commerce of the 
Netherlands had become first in the world. 

Spain was not the enemy of Holland alone. An hundred years 
before, Columbus, in her name, had discovered America. She had 
become the most powerful kinsrdom upon earth, and indulged in 
dreams of world conquest. She was thinkins: of world empire. 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT II 

She was subjugating- all the world by methods so horrible as to 
deserve the execration of mankind for all generations. All Europe 
became involved. It was the kingdom of Spain and the Pope on 
one side, and England, France and Protestantism on the other. 
Holland received the severest blows because she presented the most 
intrepid front. When William the Silent appealed to Elizabeth 
for aid she promised it as she did to Henry of Navarre, but she 
toyed with them both. There was no thought of keeping the 
promise unless the time should come when it was necessary to 
strengthen Spain's other enemies in order to keep Spain out of 
England. That time did come and the Queen dispatched to Holland 
six thousand troops gathered in the eastern counties. In time they 
returned and brought back a new knowledge of war and a new 
and better knowledge of peace, of industries, and particularly of 
religious and political freedom. Elizabeth also brought over wool- 
carders and weavers, and other skilled workmen from Flanders, 
to help on English manufactures. In all this she was unconsciously 
ripening the eastern counties for revolution. Men and women grow 
through their work. Labor quickens the thinking and clarifies the 
moral sense. The thinking and the moral sense force an advance. 
If resisted they start a revolution. 

When Henry the Eighth parted company with the Pope, who 
justly, kindly and courageously refused his divorce, he went about 
setting up a more accommodating church establishment of his own. 
Creeds or manners of worship, or protests against them, meant 
little to him. It was simply a question of kingly or political 
expediency. He tried to use the Protestant movement for his own 
ends. The result was an English Protestant state church, and a 
very great, a very rich, and a very autocratic one it soon became. 

Protestantism was for half a century a direful and continuing 
tragedy. Its life was probably saved through its alliances with 
the kings. It is not so strange that it came to take on kingly 
ways. Its cathedrals and vestments became so magnificent, its 
ceremonies so formal, its demands so extravagant, and its power 
so subversive of liberty that protests arose out of the ranks of the 
Protestants. These became vehement and the martyr fires were 
lighted. Out of these protests and out of these fires came Puri- 
tanism, as noble a spirit as ever breathed among men in troublous 
times. 

Its first outbreak was of course in the eastern counties. What 
historic ground those English eastern counties are ! Up and 
down their fair meadows, where the walls and the hedges stand 
in such dignity and peace, over the beautiful landscapes which the 



12 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

red poppies color so gorgeously Briton, and Celt, and Roman, and 
Saxon, and Norman, and Teuton, and Gaul have shaken the very- 
earth beneath their feet in terrific contention. Here imposing 
Roman walls yet stand in mute testimony of a mighty world- 
power outdone by the pertinacity, the steadiness, and the heroism 
of the Saxon. Here great Norman churches yet bear splendid proof 
of the mighty qualities of a hardy people who ruled Britain for 
four hundred years, in the end to be absorbed into the British 
life. Here the hardiest manhood of hardiest nations had combined 
in the evolution of a yet greater people. They were ripe for great 
events. They were the first to see the new lights of a new liberty 
across the German ocean. The impulse sent many of them across 
that ocean to a freedom not yet ripe in the motherland. Singly 
and in companies they went over to gain it. But, aside from one 
immortal company, they who stayed accomplished more than they 
who went, for they organized a revolution : they struck off the 
head of a king ; they set back the prerogatives of the throne to 
the mark fixed by the Commons in the Parliament House ; and they 
secured the new and yet greater liberty for all English colonies, 
for all time, in all parts of the world. 

Elizabeth, too, just like her father, played fast and loose with 
religious questions. She was doubtless devoid of religious feeling. 
Her diplomacy enabled her to keep her kingdom together through 
the peril of outside foes, and even after the destruction of the 
Armada and the removal of danger from without, her sagacity 
availed her to the end of her reign. But to her credit be it said 
that she had the wit to soften the persecutions and consent that 
" heretics " might move out and carry their " heresies " along with 
them. When she died in 1603, the man, the people, the conditions, 
and the policies came together which quickly involved the kingdom 
in a great conflagration. 

James, the son of Mary of Scotland, who succeeded the woman 
who had beheaded his mother, was something of a student and 
more of a pedant. Of course he was cursed with the nonsense 
which possessed all the kings. In his view a king ruled by right 
divine : he claimed the attributes of the living God : he thought 
he had power to make and unmake laws without being bound to 
obey them: the duty of his subjects was passive obedience to 
his will. He also went about shaping the church to his own notions, 
that it might give strength to his throne. He coerced opinions, 
sharpened persecutions, and forbade emigration. His pedantry 
unwittinelv did the Puritans and all churchmen a very great service 
by giving them a new version of the Bible in English. It quickened 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 13 

their faith, and became the law of their lives. It intensified in- 
dividualism. It put God yet higher above church and state. It 
made the right of private judgment supreme, a cardinal doctrine 
of their faith, a thing to be upheld, as a matter of course, with 
their lives. It hastened the revolution. The issue was soon on. 
Men lined up in sets and factions, in parties, and soon in armies, 
and the division lines were the same in the church and in the. 
state. 

There were three of these parties. First, there was the Royalist 
party in the state, the Conformist party in the church. It was the 
party of the King. With coddling and flattery it upheld his most 
extravagant assumptions. It was the party of the bishops, and 
stood for intensifying the ceremonials and adding to the magnifi- 
cence of the church. It bound throne and church together and 
made king and bishop one. Second, there was the party of the 
opposition in the state, the nonconformists in the church. It was 
the reform party. It was opposed to regalia, and ceremony, and 
ostentation. It was for purifying things with a vengeance, but for 
staying in the church and doing it there. Its members came to 
be called Purists or Puritans. It is true that its creed was politi- 
cally accommodating quite as much as religious. It was only up 
to its lights. It was not for separating the church from the state. 
It was for simplifying worship and for purifying the church. 
But this party, as much as the other, was for controlling the state 
and for being controlled by the state. 

A new force came into the world. Puritans accomplished what 
they undertook. The}- came to exceed all expectations. And, truth 
to tell, when they did they fell into some of the very things they 
had complained of before. They remind us of people we ourselves 
have seen. Perhaps they remind us of everybody but ourselves. 
The rank and file were rude and unlettered, narrow and austere 
men. They had much vet to learn and their descendants have since 
learned much. They were not free from faults, but their faults 
were on the outside. They were jeered in their day, and they 
have been jeered in ours. But they were sound at the heart. 
With prayer in the camp and song in the saddle, they rode rough- 
shod over king, and bishop, and aristocracy together. They did 
much which they might better have left undone. But they did more 
that religion and liberty had to have done. It is needless to say 
that here was the great political party and here the mighty army 
that changed the courses of English history. 

Then as is usual, there was the small third party. It differed 
more radicallv from the other two than thev differed from each 



14 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

other. It was English in feeling and purpose, and wanted to 
remain such, but it was bent upon genuine and complete religious 
freedom. It was against the king because it believed he usurped 
English liberty. It was opposed to a national church because it 
thought the church should be wholly independent of the state. It 
had no favors to ask ; and it had no thought of conquest ; no care 
to control. It believed the established church inherently wrong, 
and beyond reform. It looked upon the crown as a wholly 
invulnerable power in the kingdom. It stood for all that the Puri- 
tan party stood for, and more: for generosity, for toleration, for 
government on a basis that would live and let live. It knew little 
of politics and cared nothing about place and power. It did not 
lack the fighting qualities of Puritanism, but believed it not worth 
while to fight for the reorganization of a state church which would 
not cease to be a state church after reorganization. 

The Brownists, or Separatists, as these third party people were 
called, were ripe for complete religious freedom now. and because 
they thought they could get it in no other way they were ready 
to separate from the English church and the English people and 
at once cut off associations which they held most dear. Wherever 
they went, they hoped to carry whatever they loved that was under 
the English flag, and there was much, but whether they could do 
that or not, they were bent on separatism because that was the 
only door to full religious and political freedom. They would go 
in sorrow ; but their faith made them go. 

Breeding and environment certainly have much to do with life. 
It has taken more time than was intended to learn the conditions 
and the thinking out of which our American forefathers came. 
We learn quite as much of them as we are likely to find out other- 
wise, when we see that they came out of these hard conditions, 
out of this rugged people, out of these ultra eastern counties, out 
of all this turmoil, persecution and suffering, out of this yearning 
for religious liberty, out of this courage and heroism, out of this 
small, despised, sane, pious and independent third party in the 
politics and religion of the English realm. 

The center of the separatist movement in England was in the 
region where the counties of Lincoln, York and Nottingham corner 
together. Here are a dozen small villages, no larger now than 
three hundred years ago. They are about four hours, and one 
hundred fifty miles, from London. In these villages a separatist 
church, afterward the Pilgrim church, was organized in the dawning 
days of the seventeenth century. Its being was known only to its 
members. They worshiped in secret, for they dared not openly. 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT . 15 

For years its members threaded their way along the bypaths and 
across the meadow to one house and then to another to satisfy 
their souls in Christian concourse. The most common meeting 
place and doubtless the residence of the most members, though 
probably not the largest village then, and certainly not now, was 
Scrooby. The American visitor can not but wonder that so small 
a place could have been the central home of the Pilgrim company. 
In 1890 it had a population of two hundred nineteen. Bawtry, 
one mile, and Austerfield, two miles to the north, with Gains- 
borough, twelve miles to the east, were well represented in the 
movement. This last named little village, Gainsborough, is the " St 
Oggs " of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. 

From this same region another congregation of Separatists, under 
the pastorship of Rev. John Smith, or Smyth, had preceded the 
Pilgrims to Holland, and settled in Amsterdam. Bradford says of 
them, " But these afterwards falling into some errors in ye Low 
Countries for ye most part, buried themselves and their names." 
Still other English colonies had crossed the North sea and estab- 
lished churches in the Netherlands : but they have wholly disappeared 
from history. 

The congregation of most interest to us decided to go to Holland 
in 1607, f° ur years after the succession of the pedant king. This 
congregation was composed of very plain people. Bradford, as 
his manuscript abundantly proves, was a very well educated man. 
He had had some experience in the public service. William 
Brewster had been an undergraduate student at Cambridge. The 
portrait of but one member of the Mayflower company has come 
down to us : that of Winslow in the State House at Boston. He 
did not come from the Pilgrim district, but was a young printer 
from London, and his brother-in-law, Degory Priest, a hatter; 
Isaac Allerton was a tailor ; William White a wool carder ; Samuel 
Fuller a weaver; most of the others were farmers and laborers. 
A ship was hired and a day appointed for departure from the port 
of Boston, forty or forty-five miles away. Though they could 
not remain and worship as their consciences led, yet to go away 
was to violate the law and the King's command. Elizabeth had 
the sagacity to allow " heretics " to go out of the country ; James 
forbade it. After all were on board the master betraved them into 
the hands of the King's, officers, who rifled them and otherwise 
subjected them to the sorest indignities. They were thrown into 
prison for a month; then the greater part were sent back to their 
old homes, in popular disgrace, in times of great stress and danger. 
Seven were bound over to the assizes. It is strange that none 
were hanged. We know that not long before three Separatists 



1 6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

were hanged for nothing but their faith, and that the King con- 
gratulated himself upon having suppressed the sect by the 
hangings. 

The next year they secretly bargained with a Dutch shipmaster 
to take them from a point on the coast remote from any town. The 
women and children and goods were sent to the place by a round- 
about way, in a small boat, down the Idle and the Trent rivers. 
The men walking across the country reached the appointed place 
first and went aboard the vessel. A storm arising, the master 
moved out into deeper water ; before the women came the plan 
was discovered, and the Dutch master put to sea to escape arrest. 
The women and their little ones, in great sorrow and terror, were 
taken by the constables, and for weeks were carried from one place 
to another. They had no homes to be sent to. It was hardly a 
crime to follow husbands and fathers. In time the officers were 
glad to be rid of them, and they were allowed to go as best they 
could. After months of the sorest trials, the families and company 
were reunited in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, then the first com- 
mercial city of the world. 

Here they lived a year. They differed from the Separatist con- 
gregation which had gone before them from Gainsborough to 
Amsterdam. That congregation had in the meantime been led over 
from Calvinism to Arminianism. This, of course, was unthinkable 
to the Pilgrims. Because of this, and of dissensions in the other 
English churches there, and to avoid controversy with other people, 
they determined to move. John Robinson, their great pastor, had 
determined their attitude with a piety which does him credit, and 
he also defended that attitude with a sagacity which shows that 
he was an unusual man. But they wanted Christian quietude. 
Leyden attracted them. It was the most beautiful city of Holland, 
forty miles from Amsterdam, with a university and a population 
of a hundred thousand people. 

Two years later. May 5. 161 1, a house and lot were conveyed to 
Robinson and three others who were members of the congrega- 
tion. The fact that the title was taken to four persons jointly 
indicates that it was something more than a residence. It was 
doubtless the church and the residence of the pastor combined. 
It must have been quite a pretentious house, for the purchase 
price was something like $12,000. It stood between St Peter's 
church and the canal, and almost under the shadow of the Uni- 
versity of Leyden, which was established in celebration of the 
Dutch victory over Spain through the cutting of the dikes. As 
things went in those days, the colony was evidently thriftv and 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 17 

prosperous. The Leyden records are not lacking in proof that 
they were respected. 

Hard investigation by students lias thrown some light on the 
eleven years residence in Leyden. The homes were mostly in one 
neighborhood. Robinson and Brewster did some work in the uni- 
versity. Their stay in Holland was nearly identical with the period 
of the truce which the valor of the Dutch arms had forced Spain 
to make. The country, for the first time in a generation, was at 
peace. The Pilgrims were at peace, too. They found work and 
did it. They prospered, met their obligations, and were respected. 
They avoided contention. They set up a church without inter- 
ference and worship was entirely free. When put to the test, 
they practised what they had preached. There was a Scotch Pres- 
byterian congregation in the city. They had fellowship with it. 
They received English Walloons and French Huguenots into their 
membership. Better still, their distinct opponents, members of the 
Church of England, were received into fellowship. Here w r as 
material prosperity and religious peace such as they had never 
known before. How grateful it must have been to them ! 

A matter of considerable significance has been brought to light 
by the English records. William Brewster and Thomas Brewer 
set up a Pilgrim press in Leyden. Brewer furnished the money, 
and Brewster some of the brains and a large part of the nerve. 
They printed some literature, secretly and anonymously, upon the 
right of worship, and the usurpations of kings, and sent it over 
to England and Scotland in beer hogsheads. They knew how to 
make literature and how to put it where it would do the most 
good. The English King would doubtless have preferred that the 
hogsheads had contained what they were made for. Indeed, dyna- 
mite would have pleased him quite as well as Separatist literature. 
He found it out. In a fury he demanded that the Dutch officials 
should stop this business, and arrest and send over to him the 
men who were guilty of it. The Dutch authorities had some need 
of and stood in some fear of this English King, but the Dutch 
could always be exceedingly deliberate when they would. There 
was a formidable and pretty nearly interminable diplomatic cor- 
respondence. But the frenzy of the King finally forced action. 
Then the Dutch seized the type, but allowed the man to escape. 
Brewster was a fugitive for a year, and was never taken. Once 
when the opportunity did offer they sent a drunken bailiff after 
him. and the instrument of the law very appropriately brought 
back the wrons: man. The modern methods of Scotland Yard or 
the Metropolitan Police' were not employed. Brewer was im- 



l8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

prisoned for a year. But he was quite safe and well fed in a 
prison of a people who had known what it was to stand in need 
of rescue from religious persecution themselves. The demands of 
the English king for his delivery to English officers were many and 
ferocious but the Dutch found legal obstacles in size and numbers 
which do them credit. Dutch sympathy and good heartedness and 
Dutch wits, as well, very likely saved the spilling of this Pilgrim 
blood. 

They had in Leyden what they most wanted — peace and quiet — 
but in time a new menace developed and a new situation confronted 
them. In the eleven years they did not much increase in num- 
bers and the hour was at hand when the war with Spain was 
to be resumed. Bradford says " There was nothing but beating 
of drums and preparing for war." It was quite possible that Spain 
might yet triumph and then their situation would be worse in 
Holland than in England. In any event they were more than 
likely to lose their identity as a society and a church and be 
swallowed up and obliterated in the Dutch life. Their children 
began to have ideas and outlook wholly unlike their own. Some 
of those children were already intermarrying with the children of 
the Dutch. " We were likely to lose our language and our name 
of English." Their love for the motherland and for the funda- 
mental rights guaranteed by the English constitution which their 
fathers had wrested from the kings in the Great Charters did not 
abate. They mourned because of " the little good we did or were 
likely to do the Dutch in reforming the Sabbath," and they longed 
for the more general and possibly more enduring civic institutions 
which they knew the English flag ought to imply. Some of them 
wanted to move again, and to a place where they could have and 
could themselves interpret and administer the English law without 
menace from either an alien people or the selfishness and officialism 
of the English King. 

About this move they were not agreed. They discussed the mat- 
ter " not rashly, in a distracted manner, but upon joint and serious 
deliberation, often seeking the mind of God in fasting and prayer." 
They did not agree. They divided in nearly equal parts. It was 
not in anger. They had no acrimonious troubles. Winslow says, 
and his word is conclusive. " Never people upon earth lived more 
lovinglv, or parted more sweetlv, than we the church at Levden 
did." 

Half of them initiated arrangements to go to the English colonies 
in America, as yet unoccupied save by savages. Perhaps if all 
went well the other half would join them by and by. Each com- 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 19 

pany was to be a church by itself but membership was to be inter- 
changeable, " without further dismission or testimonial " they could 
go or come at their pleasure. Not many of the other half ever 
joined them. They did disappear in the Dutch life. After the 
death of Robinson, five years later, their organization disintegrated. 
After twenty years more nothing is known of them. There is no 
trace of their English names in Leyden or Amsterdam today. The 
half who came over the sea ventured splendidly and suffered un- 
speakably, but they cut their names deep on the scroll of the 
immortals. 

Of the negotiations and the bargains for the " Speedwell " and 
the " Mayflower." of the final farewells, the disappointments and 
discomforts consequent upon the wretched condition and the aban- 
donment of the " Speedwell," of the sufferings on the voyage, and 
of all the incidents, and particularly of all the surmises and infer- 
ences which any student may find in the literature of the subject, we 
can not stop to speak. 

It was the younger, more ambitious and venturesome of the 
Leyden church who moved to New England. Nearly all were 
below middle life and so far as is known but one couple was above 
fifty years of age. It was a winnowed company. Again and 
again, in England, at Amsterdam, in Leyden, upon the turning back 
of the " Speedw T ell," they had gone out from others and left the 
less resolute ones behind. Rut for the youth, hardiness, faith and 
determination of the expedition it would have wholly failed and 
probably utterly perished. 

There were one hundred and two passengers upon the May- 
flower. One died at sea. A child was born upon the ocean and 
they called his name " Oceanus." The young wife of Governor 
Bradford, only tw r enty-one years of age, was drowned and three 
others died, and another child was born in Plymouth harbor while 
the place of embarkation and settlement was being determined. 
All told there had been one hundred and four but deaths and births 
made the number ninety-nine. At the landing there were seventy-two 
males and twenty-seven females. Of these, twenty-four men and 
eighteen women were heads of families. There were twenty-two 
sons or male relatives and ten daughters or female relatives in 
these twenty-four families. Clearly the families were not large ; 
the parents were yet young. There were fifteen single men who 
came apart from their families. There w r ere fourteen males and one 
female classed as servants or workmen. 

The start from Leyden was in July, and from Old Plymouth in 
September. The landing at New Plymouth was in December. 



20 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

They were transplanted from bright summer in the Old World 
to stern winter in the New, from the comfortable homes of a 
settled and attractive city to a barren, a rock-bound, and an ice- 
bound coast. 

They laid out " the street " where Plymouth looks out across 
the bay to the northeast. Now it is " Leyden street." On either 
side they built their crude cabins. Nearest the shore they placed 
the " Common House," and on the hill, beyond the " sweet brook," 
they lifted the structure which was to be fort and church together. 
Next to it, for obvious reasons so far as the fort, but not the church, 
was concerned, was the abode of Captain Standish. 

There was little room in these crude cabins, but there would 
soon be more. Hardy as the forefathers were, many could not with- 
stand the sorrow and the cold. In the first year thirty-eight males 
and fifteen females died. It was more than half their number. Of 
these, thirteen were husbands and fourteen were wives. The deaths 
of fourteen of the eighteen wives is suggestive. None of the 
daughters died and but three of the sons, and these sons were 
in two families in which the parents perished. It is not at all 
hard to believe that these mothers sacrificed themselves in order 
that their children might live. 

Of the 24 households four were completely obliterated. Nine 
husbands and wives found burial together. Five husbands had 
been left widowers and one wife a widow. But three couples 
remained unbroken and but two were not called upon to mourn 
a member of their families gone. Five children lost both parents, 
three others were made fatherless, and three more motherless. With 
old ocean behind and the wilderness in front, and savage life all 
about them, and grim death continually among them, the spirit 
of the colony never gave way. Before the Mayflower started on 
her return voyage at the middle of April forty-seven of them had 
died, but not one of the survivors turned back with the returning 
vessel. Again they were separated and winnowed. While they cast 
furtive and sorrowing glances to the sails that were sinking beneath 
the eastern sky, the resolute outlook was to be westward. A new 
nation had gained foothold in the New World. 

There is no doubt of the intention to make the landing further 
south although there is some uncertainty as to why the purpose 
was not realized. Both the Dutch and the English desired this 
colony upon their New World soil. The colonists themselves in- 
clined to the English side and had procured a charter for a situa- 
tion upon English soil, but to the south of the " North " or " Hud- 
son " river. Finding- themselves out of their own, if not of the 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT *I 

Captain's, reckoning, and believing that they were outside of the 
rule of the English law, they made a written, an independent and 
a self-dependent compact of government, in the cabin of the May- 
flower, and forty-one men signed it. It was the first pure democ- 
racy with a written constitution in the world. Bancroft has said 
that it was the birth of constitutional liberty. 

For some years they held their goods and labor in common. 
They had mortgaged their future to serve the world. For their 
transportation they assumed a debt which they were long years 
in paying but which they in time discharged to the uttermost 
farthing. 

We can not dwell upon the minor incidents of the splendid story. 
Life was earnest, severe, unrelenting; was borne steadily and buoy- 
antly. Labor began to be rewarded. Quietude prevailed. Num- 
bers slowly augmented. Spirit and purpose came out of the gloom. 
Institutions gradually developed upon unique and enduring lines. 
That spirit has become the spirit of America. Those institutions 
have enlarged into the distinguishing institutions of the Republic. 

In ten years five hundred people had gathered. Some relations 
with the Indians and with the Dutch at the mouth of the Hudson 
had been established. In another ten years an additional five 
hundred people had gathered and other little villages began to 
show. These last ten years were the years in which Charles 
governed England without a Parliament, sharpened persecution, 
enlarged emigration, prepared the way for a revolution, and 
led on fatefully to his own tragic doom. When the Long Parlia- 
ment resumed government in the name of the people, English immi- 
gration to New England almost ceased. No other immigration than 
English had really commenced. So the little colony grew but 
slowly after 1640; but when it was fifty years of age a dozen little 
settlements were on the map. 

But the tyranny of the King had wrought other results in 
America than the sending of a few more Separatists to the little 
colony at Plymouth. In the second decade of its struggling life 
a much stronger English settlement had been made forty miles up 
the bay, where and from which the city of Boston has since grown. 
In that period quite twenty thousand English men and women' 
had made their homes upon the shore of the upper bay. They 
were not only much stronger in numbers than the people at Ply- 
mouth, but, man for man, they doubtless averaged stronger in 
wealth, in education, and in the power of material accomplishment. 
Thev certainly outdid Plymouth in their monarchial tendencies, 
in their aristocratic proclivities, in their aptitudes for managing 



22 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

things, and in their spiritual fanaticisms and frenzies. They were 
Puritans, and like the Puritans in Old England they were Pro- 
testants against and still the adherents of the English state 
church, the opposers of the English King and yet the supporters 
and defenders of the English political system. 

If we grasp the religious and political situations in Britain 
at the time of the first migration of the Pilgrims to the Nether- 
lands, we will the more easily understand the distinctions and the 
relations of these two English colonies upon the rock-bound Massa- 
chusetts coast and the ensuing course of political and religious 
history in America. 

Between the Puritan and the Pilgrim was little or no difference 
so far as religious beliefs or theological philosophy were concerned. 
Both were the products of Calvinism and of repeated revolutions 
and reformations. Their differences related to forms, ceremonies, 
methods, and to freedom of thinking and independence of action. 
But these differences comprise the fundamental and distinguishing 
characteristics of the American nation in the world. 

The Puritan movement was political more than theological. The 
inevitable opposition which always develops to the government in 
a constitutional system took on the feelings and the forms of 
Puritanism in the British kingdom. The Puritan protested against 
the claims of the kings and the doings of the King's party in the 
state and in the state church. But he had no thought of leaving 
the kingdom or separating from the church. He was for con- 
trolling both. He wanted to march at the head of the procession. 
He wanted to determine where the procession should march, how 
it should dress, what it should think, and who should be in it. 
When he could do that he was content ; and when he did it he 
did much as his Royalist opponents did when they had the power 
to do it. 

The Puritan had no understanding of the equality of all men 
before the law. That was beyond his limitations. As far as he 
could get in that direction was the equality of Puritans, or, indeed, 
to be more exact, the equality of those who were in the higher 
classes, for there were higher and lower classes in the Puritan 
theocracy. 

The Puritan knew little of religious freedom. His creed was 
coldly intellectual and it was not softened by the experiences of 
his life. His visage was long, his manners strained, his religion 
exact and often narrow, and his thinking unrelenting. His battles 
cast him in the heroic mold and made him an effective instrument 
in changing world history. 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 23, 

He was certainly a bigot, a timely and necessary bigot, but a 
bigot all the same. He had his work to do and he did it. It was 
his mission to clear the way for something better. He knew little 
of freedom and democratic institutions but he opened the road for 
religious freedom and democratic institutions. .He wrought even 
better than he knew. When he had done his work he had to 
make way for the more tolerant spirit and the wider outlook 
which his singing, his praying, and his fighting had made possible. 
The Puritan was not, by any means, exclusively of English 
blood and English speech. He developed almost coincidently in 
other lands. Wherever he developed he was the product of the 
same causes and the forerunner of the same ends. In many ways 
he was the spiritual counterpart of, and very likely his religious 
qualities were in a measure fixed by those of, the Jesuits of the 
Roman Catholic church. In whatever land he grew and whatever 
speech he used, he followed his faith and he acted up to his lights. 
Now a more tolerant and enlightened people than could live in his 
day may well be predisposed to lift their hats to him. 

The Pilgrim was a Puritan, but he was more. He was opposed 
to the English church because he was opposed to any state church. 
Therefore he had separated from it and he never expected to go 
back. He held that kings and parliaments had nothing whatever 
to do with the free flow of religious worship. That was a matter 
for the individual man and for religious bodies voluntarily asso- 
. ciated together. He was modest, plain and democratic in his own 
proceedings, but he was for all men and all churches acting upon 
their own beliefs and following their own sweet will. At Ley den- 
he received members of all churches into his communion. At 
Plymouth he did the same. He was not carried away by frenzy ; 
there were no hangings for witchcraft by the Pilgrim. He did 
not lose his head over " Papists," "Anabaptists," and whoever 
differed with him in opinion. He was hospitable to all. The 
beleagured Baptist found succor at his door. A Catholic mis- 
sionary speaks in his journal of Bradford's kindness to him, even 
of his preparing a fish dinner for him because it was Friday. At 
the upper colony they would have let him go hungry, if they 
had not found grounds enough for sending him to jail for the 
sin of differing with them — not about the fundamental beliefs 
in a common Christianity but about the mere forms of religious 
expression and the mere manner of Christian worship. 

The Pilgrim had no love for the English political system because 
that system was inseparably associated with the regulation, direc- 
tion and coercion of religious life. It was using religion for 



24 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

political ends. He feared the English crown and he expected no 
favors. The fundamental political rights which his countrymen 
had years before wrested from the king were quite as dear to 
him as to the common run of Englishmen. That is why he was 
hack under the English flag. But he knew that those rights had 
been almost overturned again by the aggressiveness of the later 
Tnonarchs. He despaired of regaining them. He lacked the 
political, property, and educational interests of his Puritan brother 
in reforming and controlling the state for his own ends. And 
anyway, he was without the physical strength and the military 
power. His feelings, his methods and his outlook were far from 
those of the Puritan. That is why he had separated himself from 
the state at an early day and was now few in numbers and in the 
wilderness. He had organized a church of his own and a state 
of his own but they were separate institutions. 

The Pilgrim was neither an anarchist nor a usurper. He did 
not fall short and he did not overreach. Pie was opposed to 
political interference with religion and he was opposed to oppres- 
sion for the mere purpose of enlarging the dangerous power and 
sustaining the sensual magnificence of the throne. But he believed 
in as much government as was necessary for the largest good and 
the best development of all. 

He took to governing as naturally as men of English speech have 
always done. From the compact in the cabin of the Mayflower 
to the merger with the Puritan colony seventy years later, he 
had all the government that was necessary to govern, and not 
enough to become a menace and a nuisance. Nine years after 
landing, a man of the immortal Mayflower company killed a neighbor 
in a quarrel. There had been no courts for there had been no 
use for them. But the colony met the emergency and proceeded 
deliberately and regularly. This little company of four or five 
hundred souls constituted a court, appointed a public prosecutor, 
drew a jury, adduced and made record of the proofs, afforded 
opportunity for defense, found a verdict of guilty, and imposed 
a sentence of death. Then they carried the record to the Puritan 
colony, forty miles away, for advice upon its regularity, and after 
approval they executed the sentence with dignity, with impressive- 
ness. and with sorrow. 

Migration over the sea did not quickly change the Pilgrim or the 
Puritan when neither expected to be changed by it. In the Old 
World and in the New the Pilgrim was a kindly, tolerant, generous, 
religious, democratic, quiet and retiring character, who had com- 
pletely developed into a Separatist and an Independent. In the 



THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 25 

Old World and in the New the Puritan was a strong, religious, 
intolerant, autocratic, aristocratic and aggressive character, with 
no concept of religious liberty and with every purpose to rule 
rather than to leave the state. The Puritan came to the New World 
when forced out of the old one; the Pilgrim came as early as he 
could and of his own free choice. 

Looking aft, it is not difficult for us to see which of these peoples 
was to endure. When the colonial union came it had to be upon 
the lines settled at Plymouth. The character and rectitude of both 
and particularly the power and forcefulness of one combined with 
the political principles and religious freedom of the other in the 
making of a splendid American state. When the American Union 
came, it had to be on the lines which the Pilgrims of the May- 
flower had laid down, enforced by the qualities which were inherent 
in Puritanism. 

It would be as absurd as it would be unjust to assert that this 
country owes all that it has and all that it is to the Pilgrims. The 
Puritans have had a great part, and other nations than the English 
have had great parts in the upbuilding of America. Brawn and 
brain and character have come from all the peoples of the earth 
to break our soil, and subdue our forests, and open our mines, 
and develop our industries, and manage our overwhelming enter- 
prises. Our flag is more attractive, our intelligence is quicker, 
and our feelings nobler, because all peoples have been welcomed to 
these shores and because religion is free and all churches may 
dwell together in Christian quietude and fraternal accord. But 
it is not too much to say that all the others have had more to do 
than the Pilgrims had to adjust themselves to the plan and spirit 
of the Republic. And it is neither absurd nor unjust to any to 
say that the genesis of our political theories and of our religious 
separatism and independence goes back with all distinctness to 
the few and humble but very great men and women who moved 
out of England into Holland for freedom's sake, who came hither 
on the Mayflower, and who will always of right be known as the 
Forefathers of the Republic. 



AMERICA'S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 

ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE HOLLAND SOCIETY OF 
NEW YORK AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA 

Reprinted from the published proceedings 

Mr President: The honor of the invitation to smoke a long pipe 
and eat a Wiener-zvurst and drink some beer [laughter] with the 
Holland Society, and incidentally to name some of the things which 
Holland has conributed to the advance of the world and to the 
upbuilding of democratic institutions in America was the more 
distinct to me because of the fact that, unlike all of you, I have 
no Holland blood. [Laughter] But for the abounding good- 
fellowship I might feel strange in this glorious company of 
thoroughbred Dutchmen, in spite of the fact that I have been 
familiar with the clatter of the wooden shoes of my old friend, 
Colonel John Yrooman upon the turnpikes of the Commonwealth 
for a generation. [Laughter and applause] 

I have studied Dutch history rather attentively and always with 
the conviction that in the writings of American historians Holland 
and her people have hardly had a fair show. [Applause] It may 
as well be said at once that the story of no people is filled with 
harder thinking or embellished with more splendid heroisms. 
[Applause] But even under a Holland roof, I am going to pre- 
pare myself for paying the respect which I feel for your fore- 
fathers by first paying the respect which I owe to my own. 
[Laughter] 

My father was an undiluted and, even after seven generations 
in America, pretty nearly an unsubdued English Puritan ; and my 
mother was as pure and true, as cheerful and gentle a Scotch- 
Irish Covenanter as the world ever saw. These were two very 
tolerant and forbearing peoples [laughter] and very likely it is 
to the mixing of all this toleration that I owe the interest I have 
in the " reniiuuisanees" [laughter] of all other peoples. [Applause] 

Hardly a day's walk from the corners of the three English 
counties where the original homes of the Mayflower Pilgrims were 
found after evading the search of scholars for more than two 
hundred years, lies the little hamlet from which the first pair of 
my paternal grandparents in America came to Boston with one 
of the earliest Puritan migrations. For seven generations and 

26 



AMERICAS EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 27 

until my mother unsettled the practice each son and grandson 
in the direct line won a Puritan maiden for his wife. If those 
six Puritan girls were as winsome as George Bouton makes 
Priscilla — or Katrina, for that matter, — [laughter], and I swear 
that they were, every one of them, then there is proof enough 
that if any one of those men had gone any farther he would have 
fared a great deal worse. 

But the time came when even the Puritan maiden had to stand 
aside. In 1806 a young man near Belfast in Ireland with the 
Scotch name of Sloan and the Bible name of Samuel, and with 
a religion as Scotch as his name, came to the town of Argyle in 
our county of Washington. Before doing so he plighted his troth 
with a girl whose name, Rachael MacMinn, was as Scotch and as 
much of the Bible as his own, and whose body and soul made her 
as sweet and beautiful a human flower as ever grew in any land, 
that when he had found the place for their home he would return 
for her and they would go and make it together. The troth was 
kept and one of their daughters was the girl who interrupted 
the sway of the Puritan maiden in our family. It must be admitted, 
however, that with my marriage it was completely restored. 
[Laughter] 

I am rather glad that my blood was mixed. If the ingredients 
were not vicious or insipid it is quite as well that they should 
act upon each other. If the English Puritan and the Scotch 
Covenanter had much in common they surely had enough in 
difference, and each was sufficiently opinionated to dispute that 
the other made the world without any help, or set quite all of 
the stones in the foundations of American institutions. Perhaps 
it is the mixture that makes me considerate of Dutchmen and it 
may help me to treat fairly of the ingredients which old Holland 
contributed to the making of America. [Laughter] 

A thousand years ago great throngs of people from the parts of 
middle and northern Europe adjacent to the high seas moved to 
the westward and compounded a new nation in Britain. Through 
qualities which were inherent and which were modified and 
strengthened in the process of assimilation that new nation showed 
qualities which were then unknown and were very great. It showed 
appreciation of the natural right of every man and of the true 
functions of the combined strength. It developed both initiative 
and self-control. It limited the prerogative of the king without 
destroving the kingdom. It began to stand for the systematic 
restraint which is vital to security and for the freedom which is 
the life current of intellectual progress. It showed considerable 



28 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

spiritual life guided by some measure of rational thinking; it 
advanced very slowly yet steadily in the arts and sciences ; it gained 
in outlook and accomplishment through doing. Above all it organ- 
ized representative assemblies and courts to declare rules of law, 
and it organized armies and navies and used them to command 
order and enforce law more systematically than had ever been done 
before. 

But all this was the slow, heavy, labored process of centuries. 
Through all this unfolding the power of the king was decisive, 
most of the time conclusive, and that power distinctly and 
successfully opposed the uplifting of the people. The masses were 
sodden and ignorant. There was not democracy enough to break 
its way through. 

In the midst of this a new continent was discovered and thinly 
peopled by slight migrations from all the nations of the world. 
Here the power and thought and law and methods of Britain 
were dominant, but remoteness, life in the open, and other new 
factors which entered in, developed a people very unlike the English 
people, a nation with ideals wholly different from those of the 
British nation. Frankness would say that pretty nearly all rule 
became distasteful. Foreign rule became intolerable. Separation 
had to come. Indeed one of the foremost of recent English writers 
has said that it had to be in order to save English liberty. It 
came by violence. A new nation emerged, retaining of necessity 
the language of England and what was good of the English political 
system. Because the separation was by violence there was conse- 
quent hate, and the process of national differentiation was prompt 
and decisive. 

But a little people, with such antecedents and such expectations, 
were not to be left alone. Soon history began to repeat itself. 
The very peoples who a thousand years before had sent vast throngs 
to compound the British nation sent greater throngs over wider 
seas to coalesce with the resultant stock and compound still another 
nation. Each of these throngs brought much. Every nation of 
the earth has given something. The differentiation has become 
more and more conclusive until there has emerged a mightv peo- 
ple with characteristics of speech, thought, dress, energy, business 
versatility and aggressiveness, diplomatic directness, passion for 
discovery and genius for invention, religious sense and political 
theories, which are recognizable at once in every part of the world 
and respected wherever recognized. [Applause] 

What each people has brought to us is now a grateful theme 
for all of us. The chemical affinity has become so complete that 



America's educational debt to the dutch 29 

the sun has gone down on the day of apprehension or of jealousy. 
We have come to see that the factors of most worth to us are 
strongest in the men and women who honor their forefathers 
and are truest to the inspiring memories of their fatherland. 
[Applause] 

The factors of the American national life are not numbers alone, 
not brawn and muscle alone, not mines and farms and factories 
alone. Bluff and pretense were inevitable with a small but nervy 
people facing such problems ; and there were some who mistook 
them for the distinguishing features of the national life. Large 
numbers, cheerful humor, the genuine culture which comes from 
ceaseless work, the eligibility of the commercial situation, com- 
plete agreement upon political theories and an orderly settlement 
of new questions, with the steadying and broadening which come 
of increasing accountability, have compounded original factors into 
a new national entity which does not expect to meddle with other 
peoples but which does expect to be reckoned with in the general 
affairs of a globe in which we all have some interest and are charge- 
able with some responsibility. [Applause] 

The original factors of our national life came to us because 
they could not find their opportunity in other lands, because they 
were rejected by the prevailing political systems of other nations. 
Free religious feeling which would not be bound by an unre- 
ligious theological system and would not be used to bind the 
thought of a people ; industry which would have some reward 
in accomplishment ; genius which could do things and throbbed 
for wider opportunities ; imagination which could foresee higher 
living ; fellowship which insisted that every man should have his 
fair chance ; scientific research which could let- in the truth upon 
the superstitions of the ages : unfolding social and political opinion 
which was coming to see that a government must make the most 
of every one and gain the love of every one to be of account to 
men ; — these were the primary elements of our national life, the 
factors which gave fiber and flavor to the American spirit in the 
world. [Long applause] 

Of these the share which Holland brought is surely not to be 
held second to that of any other people. [Cries of "Good"] At 
the beginning of the seventeenth century, the opening of our period 
of permanent colonization, she had above all the other nations 
the qualities which now distinguish the American life. She had 
gained those qualities through a manner of life which has always 
made freemen and through decisive democratic tendencies which 
even then had been ripening for centuries. [Applause] 



30 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Nothing is more manifest and surely nothing is more gratifying 
to the student of education than the unvarying companionship in 
all history of the democratic and the educational advance. Even 
as far back as the fourteenth century the independence of the cities 
in the Netherlands had led to common schools and universities. 
The results of the German Reformation were particularly decisive 
and enduring in the Low Countries. In the early sixteen hundreds 
primary and secondary schools became common and were opened 
to boys and girls alike. These prepared the Dutch people for 
deeds of greatest moment to the world. Work is the making of 
the worker. Carlyle was right when he said that the lifting of 
the marshes up above the ocean, and the driving of Spain out 
of the Netherlands were the making of a free and virile people. 
It took forty years of unspeakable suffering and a hundred thousand 
lives to break the grasp of the Inquisition. If the schools quali- 
fied a people for fighting the first great world battle for liberty 
to a successful issue the result made the extension of the schools 
inevitable. Universities became the permanent memorials of mili- 
tary victories in Holland and the union of Utrecht was followed 
by an order that " all the inhabitants of towns and villages within 
six weeks find good and competent schoolmasters.' 5 May says 
" the whole population was educated : the higher classes were 
singularly accomplished." Rrodhead says that " schools were 
everywhere provided, at public expense, with good schoolmasters 
to instruct the children of all classes in the usual branches of 
education." Motley says " It was a land where every child went 
to school, where almost every individual inhabitant could read and 
write, where even the middle classes were proficient in mathematics 
and the classics, and could speak two or more modern languages, 
and where the whole nation with but few exceptions were pro- 
ducers of material and intellectual wealth." [Applause] 

These great impulses appeared directly in the industrial activities 
and in the fine arts, the literature, the scientific study, the political 
theories and the common life of the country. 

Agriculture was diversified and intensified. Science was really 
used for the first time in trying to ascertain the potential power of 
an acre of land. The agricultural colleges of America are even 
now going back to those people for assistance. [Applause] 

Craftsmanship in wood and metal and leather and in the textile 
fabrics and dexterity in all household and useful arts reached a 
development which was notable, and is so still. 

The Holland art of that period brings us the finest portraval 
we have of the best life there was in the. Generations when societv 



AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 31 

was getting upon its feet. It turned from impossible angels and 
men and devils, from weakling princes and skimpy mistresses, to 
men grown virile in tkeir country's service, to genuine motkers 
and real babies, to tke home and to family life, to horses at work 
and cattle that could bellow, to windmills and dikes and boats 
and hardy sailor folks, to golden meadows and gorgeous sunsets, 
and to all of the scenes and effects which Dutch artists saw. 
[Applause] In all of these. Dutch art was prolific. But it was more 
than prolific. In technic, in harmony of color, in quick recognition 
of the beauty of the scene, in the interpretation of character, in 
the exemplification of religious feeling, which was both rational and 
devout, it produced a distinct school of art which stands in a 
class by itself unto this day. [Applause] 

Literature was not censored and science was dignified and en- 
couraged. In the three hundred years after 1573 there were 4700 
students from England and the United States in attendance upon 
the University of Ley den, under the shadow of which our Pilgrim 
forefathers rested securely for eleven years. 

All this freedom produced the first near approach to a pure 
democracy in the world. \ Applause] A republic grew and wrote 
a constitution and each of the seventeen provinces which constituted 
it had a constitution of its own. Douglas Campbell has traced 
a score of the salient features of that political system, — the powers 
and limitations of the presidency, the organization of the national 
senate, religious toleration, freedom of the press, manhood suffrage, 
written ballots, free schools for girls and boys alike, the inde- 
pendence of the judiciary, the absence of primogeniture, the record- 
ing of conveyances, public prosecutors, the protection of persons 
charged with crime, amenability to the civil laws alone, and many 
others which are fundamental in our own political system. And in 
doing that he proved the source from which they came. 

Now all this came to its maturity in the Netherlands just before 
the great Puritan movement in England and just before the first 
permanent colonization of America. The center of the Puritan 
movement was in the northeastern counties, the counties which are 
against the German ocean. The Dutch controlled the carrying 
trade of the world. Their seamen were continually in the English 
ports. Out of these counties Elizabeth had sent six thousand Eng- 
lish troops to aid the Dutch against the Spanish when duplicitv 
would suffice no longer. She little realized that when thev came 
back they would bring the germs of a revolution with them. Into 
these counties she had brought spinners and weavers from Flanders 
without foreseeing that they would teach a great deal besides dex- 



32 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

terity in their art. These counties produced the greater part of 
the early English Christian martyrs and the great body of the 
20,000 men and women who migrated to Massachusetts bay in 
the twenty years following 1630 when Charles was ruling the realm 
without a Parliament and preparing the way for the notable trial 
in the Parliament house and the still more notable scene which 
followed. Perhaps those counties did even better, for they pro- 
duced the greater part of the Puritan parliamentary leaders. They 
not only produced old Cromwell but his regiment of Ironsides. 
They were the seat of the Separatist movement which was the 
unexpected and at that time the totally unrecognized climax of Eng- 
lish Puritanism. They were the homes of the Plymouth Pilgrim 
Fathers. No one can read the literature of the subject with an 
open mind, and remember that Englishmen are not very subject to 
spontaneous combustion, without knowing full well that all these 
things which meant so much to England and to America followed 
sharply upon the developments in the Netherlands and were 
ushered in by the mighty fires which lighted up the dome of 
Heaven's temple from across the North sea. [Prolonged applause] 
The Pilgrim Fathers, scattered abroad in England, flew to Hol- 
land for refuge in the very year in which the Dutch arms had 
triumphed over Spain and forced a truce of twelve years with 
Philip. When they applied to the burgomasters of Leyden for 
leave to reside in that city this indorsement, discovered recently 
in the Archives at the Hague and sufficient to place every freeman 
and certainly every American under lasting obligations to the peo- 
ple of Holland, was placed upon the margin of their petition. 
" The Court in making a disposition of this memorial declare that 
they refuse no honest persons free ingress to come and have their 
residence in this city, provided that such persons behave themselves, 
and submit to the laws and ordinances; and therefore the coming 
of the Memorialists will be agreeable and welcome. This done 
at their Council House 12th February, 1609." If I were a Dutch- 
man, and as thrifty as Dutchmen are. I would write that over my 
doorway in letters of gold. [Applause] 

At the end of the truce they migrated to the New England 
coast. They intended to settle at the mouth of the Hudson or 
below. No one knows now whether it was treachery or an honest 
mistake which landed them on the " rock-bound coast." While 
the Pilgrims were in Leyden the Dutch settled here upon Manhattan 
island ; then the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth ; and later the Puri- 
tans at Boston. These were the first permanent settlements of 
civilized peoples in America. The Dutch and the Pilgrims were 



AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 33 

weak in numbers and in resources. Up to 1630 neither numbered 
a thousand souls. The Puritans were strong in numbers, gaining 
20,000 people in twenty years ; speaking relatively they were rich, 
powerful and learned. 

Each of these peoples brought with them to the new country 
the beliefs and the institutions which were theirs in the old country. 
The Dutch brought the democratic theories which they had 
developed through a splendid and heroic history. The Pilgrims 
held to the faith and the thinking which had made them Separatists 
from the English state church and caused them to be hunted out 
of the English state, with such modifications and growth as twelve 
years in Holland had given to them. The Dutch came for com- 
merce which was no less legitimate then than now. [Applause] 
They assumed, as of course, that the manner of life and the thinking 
of the fatherland would continue here. The Pilgrims came because 
of their love for their English speech and English ways, because 
they feared that if they remained in Holland they would wholly 
disappear in the Dutch life (of the half of the company remaining 
in Ley den no trace can be found after twenty-five years), and 
because they must have the religious and political freedom which 
they could not have in England. The Puritans were not seeking 
religious or political freedom. They maintained class distinctions 
and distinguished between the nobles and the commons. They 
were an intolerant religious sect ; and with the same sternness 
which cut off the head of the king and set up the commonwealth 
in the mother country, they imprisoned, banished and hanged any 
man or woman who differed with them and gave promise of 
destroying the harmony of the sect. They were associated with 
a party which was the same in the state religion and in the politics 
of England, and they had no thought of separateness or inde- 
pendence. They believed in the union of church and state. Their 
government erected the church building, paid the minister, and 
managed the affairs of the church. No man had any part in the 
government who was not a member of the church. 

But neither numbers nor wealth, nor even scholarship nor re- 
ligious enthusiasm, were to determine the character of American 
institutions. [Applause] When the Pilgrims and the Puritans 
coalesced in the colony of Massachusetts it had to be upon prin- 
ciples which started in those northeastern English counties and 
came to their full flower in the Netherlands. Old England with 
the help of New England misrht overthrow by force the little 
Dutch colonv at the mouth of the Hudson but when union came 
in America it had to be upon the principles for which those Dutch- 



34 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

men stood, and which even in the dark hour of overthrow they 
never surrendered. [Prolonged applause] 

It has been a very common habit to credit the origin of our com- 
mon school system to England and to Puritanism although England 
has never had a system of common schools. The English edu- 
cational system comprised colleges with preparatory schools for 
sons of noble birth ; not until within the memory of men of middle 
age has English policy undertaken to enforce elementary teaching 
upon all the children of the people. New England followed Old 
England. The first New England school was a college and the 
next was a Latin school. All of the New England schools before 
1670 were classical schools established to be tributary to the col- 
lege. Very likely they had to bend their work to the elementary 
branches to make up for what was not done at home but the 
universal plan was that the primary work should be at home by 
the parents if they could or the minister if; they could not. Happily 
they recorded all they did but there is no evidence of any school 
whatever in the Plymouth colony for full fifty years after the 
landing or of any elementary or common school among the 20,000 
people at Boston for more than forty years after the founding 
of the city. The Massachusetts schools received no girls until 
1789, one hundred and fifty years after the settlement, and re- 
ceived them for only half time for forty years after that. The 
Puritans had nothing in common with other people. How were 
they to have common schools? If the old heroes could return to 
earth and hear some things which their descendants claim there 
would be some castigations without formal trials if not some hang- 
ings without the benefit of clergy. [Laughter] 

The Dutch colonial charter of 1629 decreed that " the colonists 
shall, in the speediest manner, endeavor to find out ways and 
means to support a minister and a schoolmaster that thus the 
service of God and zeal for religion may not grow cold and be 
neglected among them." That is quite as good as the phrase 
about not letting learning " perish in the graves of their fathers " 
in the Massachusetts law enacted 18 years later. [Applause] 
A Dutch schoolmaster was an official of the state and when he 
was sent a school resulted. Upon the petition of the colonists 
an official schoolmaster was sent over from Holland in 1633 and 
a school was opened upon this island of Manhattan. It was the 
first school of which there is any record in America. It was open 
to all and it was supported out of the common moneys of the 
colony. It has continued under changing political conditions and 
therefore under differing auspices until this day. Other similar 



AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 35 

schools, two public schools of secondary grade, and a dozen schools 
under private management with the government approval, were 
established upon this island in the thirty years before the English 
arms took possession of it. [Applause] 

In the ensuing century and down to the opening of the Revolu- 
tion the English royal governor and the Dutch colonial legislature 
were in frequent conflict over schools. The result was that prac- 
tically nothing was done. No act of the English government favor- 
able to schools appears in all that time except the reluctant approval 
of two Latin schools for limited periods ; there was no act and 
no consent which was inconsistent with the uniform English policy 
of advanced schools for the nobles and no schools at all for the 
people. 

If the democratic advance and the common enlightenment first 
brought from Holland to America the germs of the great free 
elementary school system of the country and give New York the 
honor of the first free school of the land, her Dutch antecedents 
give New York her primacy in being the first state to appropriate 
state moneys to encourage primary education, the first to establish 
state supervision of schools, and the first to relate all the schools 
in a uniform system which has become universal. [Applause] 

And surely there is something of their differing origins signi- 
fied in the fact that all of her sister states preceded Massachusetts 
in writing the guaranty of religious freedom in their constitutions ; 
while New York, which never had a state church and was never 
tinctured with intolerance, was the first organized government 
in the world to enshrine in her fundamental law the sacred pledge 
of absolute spiritual independence and of political action without 
ecclesiastical intervention. [Applause] 

But it must not be surmised that the forefathers of the Holland 
Society were an unreligious people. There were forty editions 
of the Bible or of the New Testament printed in Holland before 
there was one in England. It was their religion which made 
them refuse to permit their religion to be bound, which enabled 
them to anticipate by two hundred years the attitude of America 
and refused to be taxed without their consent, which impelled 
them, with little return save the duplicity of the English queen, 
to stand as the shield and helper of England until the very seas 
were crimson with their blood. It was their religion which led 
them to become the heroic and historic representatives of the 
principles upon which democracy may advance and free institu- 
tions may endure. [Applause] 

3 



36 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

The Dutch were a little people but they were greater than the 
largest. Their thinking, their religion, and their valor broke out 
:he roads over which democracy was to find the way to a new 
civilization. All Americans are under special and enduring obliga- 
tions to them for surely they were the first to declare the funda- 
mental principles of our Republic. [Long applause] 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 

ADDRESS AT NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES AT 
THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS IN CONNECTION WITH THE 
INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT JAMES 

By courtesy of the Atlantic Monthly 

There are at least four features which distinguish university work 
in America and exercise a decisive influence upon the form of 
government in American universities. 

The first grows out of the universal democracy of the country 
and the common ambitions of the people. Every one who shares 
in the spirit of the country wants to go to the top and continually 
hears that he may if he will seize his opportunities. He has no 
thought of following his father's work unless, as is quite improb- 
able, it is in line with his special ambitions. The need of the best 
training is now everywhere recognized. The secondary schools 
have become a part of the common school system and every teacher 
in high school or academy leads his students very near to the point 
of thinking that they will lose their chance in life and even be 
discredited if they do not advance to college or university. The 
university life is now specially attractive to the young and they 
want a share in the pleasure and enthusiasm of it. This brings 
to the universities great numbers who in other days never went 
to college ; who in other lands would not go now. Many of these 
must be both led and pushed. 

Then, the common thought about liberal education has changed. 
It is no longer only classical, culturing, disciplinary ; it must pre- 
pare students not only for the multiplying professions but for the 
multiplying industries. It trains one for work which may dis- 
tinguish him. Cultivated aimlessness is no longer the accepted 
ideal of American scholarship. Culture which is not the product 
of work, either mental or manual, with some definite point to it, 
is held to be at secondhand, only skin-deep, and not to be taken 
seriously. It must not be said that mere strength and steadiness 
in holding a job are the marks of an educated man. There must 
be native resourcefulness and versatility, sound training and serious 
study, discrimination in means and methods, and rational appli- 
cation to real things in life in ways that bring results of some 
distinct worth to the world. It makes little difference what one 
does, but he must do something. The all-important fact is not 

37 



38 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

that real learning may now be found in all businesses — though 
that is important — but that one must do something of recognized 
value to be held a scholar. It may be not only in letters, or science, 
or law, or medicine, or theology, but it may also be in administra- 
tion, in planning and constructing, in mechanics, in agriculture, 
in banking, in public service, in anything else worth while. 

If one's powers of observation, of investigation, of expression 
and of accomplishment, lead him to do something of real concern, 
to do it completely and quite as well as, or better than, others can 
do it, and impel him to open up new vistas and methods of doing 
other things of larger moment, he has a better right to be held 
an educated man than he who incubates the unattainable and brings 
forth nothing. And not only have educational values changed, 
but educational instrumentalities have changed. Books and aca- 
demic discussions have their part, but in many directions it is 
now a minor part. Things are taught and learned, new insight 
and the power to do are gained, through actual doing. And not 
only is the training through doing rather than through reading 
and talking but the opportunity of selection extends to every sub- 
ject and every study. It requires buildings and equipment and 
teachers never before within the means of an institution. It has 
revolutionized the scope, the possessions, the plans and methods, the 
offerings and the outlook of the universities. While this is com- 
ing to be true in a measure in other countries, the unconventional 
freedom, the industrial aggressiveness, and the unparalleled volume 
of money going into university operations in this country have 
given us the leadership of a world movement in higher education. 

Again, university revenues come from men who have done things 
and want other things done. It is exclusively so in the private 
institutions, and the people and their representatives who vote 
appropriations to the state universities have no other thought. 
While few are so short-sighted as to be opposed to a balanced and 
harmonious university evolution, still money is provided more freely 
for the kinds of instruction in which the providers are most inter- 
ested. This, of course, gives shape and trend to the development. 
But it does more: it creates the need of teachers not heretofore 
adequately prepared or not prepared in adequate numbers. The 
vastness, the newness and the unpreparedness of it all create the 
need of general oversight and close administration. Even more, 
when teachers are not supported by student fees, but are paid 
from the university treasury without reference to the number of 
students they have or very sharp discrimination about the quality 
of work they do. there is - no automatic way of orettinsf rid of 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 39 

teachers who do not teach or of investigators who do not produce. 
Some competent and protected authority must accomplish this and 
continually reinforce the teaching staff with virile men. The 
competition between institutions rather than between men, and 
the natural reluctance at deposing a teacher, are producing pathetic 
situations at different points in many American universities and 
are likely to become the occasion of more weakness in our university 
system than has been widely realized. 

Yet again, the sentiment of this country does not agree, and 
doubtless will never agree, that American universities shall stand 
for more " scholarship " without reference to character, or that 
boys shall be allowed to go to the devil without hindrance for 
the lack of university leadership or to accommodate administrative 
cowardice or convenience. Students will have to be controlled 
and guided in this country, and American universities will have 
to have leaders who are leaders of morals as well as of learning 
and who will stir the common sense and use the common senti- 
ment through the authoritative word spoken in the crowd. 

One may lament that our universities are not copied upon Ger- 
man or English models ; that overwhelming numbers of students 
are going to them ; that all who go are not serious students ; that 
we are moving in new educational directions ; that our professors 
are not made to live on fees ; and that there is neither a care 
for superficial culture without much regard for true scholarship, 
nor a vaunting of mere scholarship without reference to moral 
character. The labor is lost. These things are so : they are right 
because they are so ; because they are the outgrowth of the com- 
pounding of a great new nation in the world and because they are 
the logical outworkings of a marvelous advance in the thinking 
of men who are free to do some thinking for themselves. 

It is hardly worth while to be troubled because we can not see 
the road beyond the turns that are ahead. There is a road beyond 
the turns — or one will be made. President Pritchett of the Massa- 
chusetts Institute, in a recent address at the University of Michi- 
gan, published in the September Atlantic, discusses, without 
answering, the question — " Shall the University become a business 
corporation ? " Dr Pritchett ordinarily does things exactly and 
completely. He can answer questions — particularly when he asks 
them of himself. He did not answer this one because the answer 
is so obvious. He used his question to express a very common 
skepticism. Of course the university can not become a business 
corporation with a business corporation's ordinary implications. 
Such a corporation is without what is being called spiritual aim — 



40 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

is without moral methods. Universities are to unlock the truth 
and turn out the best and the greatest men and women; business 
corporations are mainly to make money. If this is a harsh char- 
acterization, it can not be denied that it has been earned by 
the great business corporations with which the great uni- 
versities must be compared if they are to be compared with any. 
A university can not become such a corporation without ceasing 
to be a university. 

The distinguishing earmarks of an American university are its 
moral purpose, its scientific aim, its unselfish public service, its 
inspirations to all men in all noble things, and its incorruptibility 
by commercialism. But that is no reason why sane and essential 
business methods should not be applied to the management of its 
business affairs. It is a business concern as well as a moral and 
intellectual instrumentality and if business methods are not applied 
to its management it will break down. If they are not to be 
employed, the university with its vast accumulations of materials 
and men must be a mistake or, worse yet, a wrong. It is neither 
a mistake nor a wrong or it would not be here. It is neither 
an accident nor an impulse : it is a growth, the deliberate product 
of conditions, of means and of thought. It is a great combina- 
tion of material resources and moral forces essential to modern 
competitions, the needed inspiration of all factors in the popula- 
tion for large areas of territory, and its usefulness depends upon 
giving the management both moral sense and worldly knowledge. 

The responsible authorities in the management of a university 
are the trustees, the president, and the faculty. Legal enactments 
settle in some measure the exact functions of each, but common 
knowledge of the kinds of government which succeed when much 
property and many interests are involved, as well as the imperative 
necessities of the particular situation, have gone much further to 
establish the governmental procedure in the university. While the 
immediate purpose is to exploit the functions and powers of the 
university president, some reference, necessarily brief, must be 
made to the prerogatives and duties of the trustees and faculty. 

A vital principle in all government involving many cares and 
interests is tersely expressed in the statement that bodies legislate 
and individuals execute. It goes without saying that legislation 
must be by a body which is both morally responsible and legally 
competent, and common observation proves to us that it must con- 
cern a real situation, to be of any real worth. If it involves special 
knowledge, it must be by men who have the knowledge or who 
will respect the opinions of others who have. 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 41 

- The trustees of a university are charged by law, either statutory 
or judge-made, or by widely acknowledged usage, with that general 
oversight and that legislative direction which will make sure of 
the true execution of the trust. They are to secure revenues and 
control expenditures. They are to prevent waste and assure results. 
They are never to forget that they represent the people who 
created and who maintain the university. They are not to rep- 
resent these people as a tombstone might — but as living men may. 
They are to do the things their principals would assuredly do 
if in their places to enlarge the advantage to the cestui que trust. 
This is a heavy burden. It must be assumed that it is given to 
picked men who are especially able to bear it ; who would not 
give their time to it for mere money compensation, but are happy 
in doing it for the sake of promoting the best and noblest things. 
The trustees do not live upon the campus and they are not 
assumed to be professional educationists. Their judgment is likely 
to be quite as good upon the relations of the work to the public 
interests and as to what the institution should do to fulfil its 
mission as that of any expert would be. To get done what they 
want done, they must enact directions and appoint competent agents. 
The individual trustee has no power of supervision or direction 
not given to him by the recorded action of the board. What they 
do is to be done in session after the modification of individual 
opinions through joint discussion. It must be reduced to exact 
form and stand in a permanent record. Trustees make a mess 
of it when they usurp executive functions and they sow dragons' 
teeth when they intrigue with a teacher or hunt a job for a patriot 
who thinks he is in need of it. They are bound to regard expert 
opinion and to appoint agents who can render a more expert 
service than any others who can be procured. They are to keep 
the experts sane, on the earth, in touch with the world, as it were. 
They are to sustain agents and help them to succeed, and they are 
to remove agents who are not successful. From a point of view 
remote enough and high enough, they are to inspect the whole 
field. They are bound to be familiar with all that the institution 
is doing. They are to be alert in keeping the whole organization 
free from whatever may corrupt, and up to the very top notch of 
efficient public service. There is too much money involved to per- 
mit of foolishness, too high interests at stake to allow of vacilla- 
tion and uncertainty. Under a responsibility that is unceasing 
and unrelenting they must learn the truth and never hesitate to 
act. And they must find their abundant reward, not in any 
material return to themselves, but in the splendid fact that the 



42 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

great aggregation of land and structure and equipment, of great 
teachers and aspiring students, of sacred memories and precious 
hope and potential possibilities, is doing the work of God and 
man in the most perfect way and in the largest measure which 
their knowledge and experience, their entire freedom and their 
combined energy can devise. 

The business of university faculties is teaching. It is not 
legislation and it is not administration, — certainly not beyond the 
absolute necessities. There is just complaint because the neces- 
sities of administration take much time from teaching. It lessens 
the most expert and essential work which the world is doing. 
It seldom enlarges opportunity or enhances reputation. It is true 
that teachers have great fun legislating but it is not quite certain 
that, outside of their specialties, they will ever come to conclusions 
or that, if they do, their conclusions will stand. The main advant- 
age of it is the relaxation and dissipation they get out of it. 
That is great. And, in a way, it may be as necessary as it is 
great. Of course teachers could not endure it if they were always 
to conduct themselves out of the classroom as they do in it. 
Perhaps others would also have difficulty in enduring it. They 
are given to disorderliness and argumentation beyond any other 
class who stands so thoroughly for doing things in regular order. It is 
not strange. It is the inevitable reaction, — what some of them would 
call the psychological antithesis, I suppose. Nor is it to be repressed 
or regretted for it adds to the effectiveness and attractiveness of the 
most effective and attractive people in the world. All this is often 
particularly true of the past masters in the art. No wonder that 
Professor North, who taught- Greek for sixty years at Hamilton 
College — " Old Greek," as many generations of students fondly 
called him — wrote in his diary that it would have to be cut in 
the granite of his tombstone that he " died of faculty meetings," 
for he was sure that some day he would drop off before one would 
come to an end. 

But the needs of the profession ought to be met by directing 
the surplus of physical and intellectual energy into really useful 
and potential channels, such as athletics, or battling over academic 
questions with the doughty warriors of other universities. Speak- 
ing seriously, university policies are not to be settled by majority 
vote. They are to be determined by expert opinion. The very fact of 
extreme expertness in one direction is as likely as not to imply 
lack of it in other directions. Experts are no more successful than 
other people in settling things outside of their zone of expertness. 
Within that they are to have their way so long as thev sustain 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 43 

themselves and the money holds out. But the resources are not to 
be equally divided. University rivalries are not to be adjusted by 
treaties between the rivals. More of university success depends 
upon keeping unimportant things from being done in a mistaken 
way than in developing useful policies and pursuing them in 
the correct way. Department experts are to determine depart- 
ment policies, college experts college policies, and university ex- 
perts university policies. 

What the President of the United States is to the federal Con- 
gress, the president of the university is to the board of trustees. 
It has not long been so, because American universities are recent 
creations. When colleges wer'e small, when the care of their 
property was no task, when all of a college were of one sect 
and theology was the main if not the only purpose, when there 
was but one course of study and the instruction was only bookish 
and catechetical — administration was no problem at all. -There 
was nothing to put a strain on the ship. Even though there was 
no specific responsibility and no delegation of special functions 
with immediate accountability, possessions did not go to waste, 
frauds did not creep in, and injustice and paralysis did not ensue. 
It may easily be so now in the smaller colleges ; it can not be 
so in the great universities. The attendance of thousands of 
students, the enlargement of wealth and of the number of students 
who go to college without any very definite aim, the admission 
of women, the more luxurious and complex life, the greater need 
of just and forceful guidance of students, the multiplication of 
departments, the substitution of the laboratory for the book, the 
new and numberless processes, the care of millions of property 
and the handling of very large amounts of money, and the con- 
tinual and complete meeting of all the responsibilities which this 
great aggregation of materials and of moral and industrial power 
owes to the public, have slowly but logically and as a matter of 
course developed the modern university presidency. It is the 
centralized and responsible headship of a balanced administrative 
organization, with specialized functions running out to all of the 
innumerable cares and activities of the great institution. It is the 
essential office which holds the right of leadership, which has 
the responsibility of initiative, which is chargeable with full in- 
formation and held to be endowed with sound discretion, which 
may act decisively and immediately to conserve every interest and 
promote every purpose for which the university was established. 

It may be well to specify and illustrate. Conditions are not 
wholly ideal in a university. Men and women not altogether ripe 



44 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

for translation have to be dealt with. Real conditions, often un- 
precedented, have to be met. Not only effectiveness within, but 
decent and helpful relations with neighbors, constituents and the 
world are to be assured. Some authority must be able to do 
things at once and some word must often be spoken to or for 
the university community. When spoken, it must be a free word, 
uttered out of an ample right to speak. 

An American university may be possessed of property worth 
from three to thirty millions of dollars. This is in lands and build- 
ings and appliances and securities. These things may be legis- 
lated about, but that is not the care of them. To keep them from 
spoliation and make the most of them there must be expert care 
through a competent department but in harmonious relations with 
an ever present power which has the right and responsibility of 
declaring and doing things. 

The very life of the institution depends upon eliminating weak 
and unproductive teachers and upon reinforcing the teaching body 
with the very best in the world. Unless there is scientific aggres- 
siveness in the search of new knowledge some very serious claims 
must be abandoned and some attitudes completely changed. No 
board ever got rid of a teacher or an investigator — no matter how 
weak or absurd — except for immorality known to the public. The 
reason why a board can not deal with such a matter is the lack 
of individual confidence about what to do and of individual re- 
sponsibility for doing nothing. But, with three or four hundred 
in the faculty, the need of attention to this vital matter is always 
present. No board knows where new men of first quality are 
to be found : no board can conduct the negotiations for them or 
fit them into an harmonious and effective whole. The man who 
is fitted for this great burden and who puts his conscience up 
against his responsibility can hardly be expected to tolerate the 
opposition of an unsubstantial sentiment which would protect a 
teacher at all hazards, or the more subtle combination of selfish 
influences which puts personal over and above public interests 
when the upbuilding of a university is the task in hand. 

Not only must the teaching staff be developed, — the work must 
be organized. It must develop a following, connect with the cir- 
cumstances and purposes of a constituency, and lead as well as 
it can up to the peaks of knowledge. It is not necessarv that all 
universities cover the same lines of work or have the same 
standards. It is not imperative that all have the same courses or 
courses of the same length. It is necessary that all serve and 
uplift their people. Rut how? A master of literature will say 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 45 

through classical training and literary style ; a scientist will say 
through laboratories ; a political economist will say through his- 
tory and figures and logic ; an engineer will say through roads 
and bridges and knowledge of materials, and the generation and 
transmission of power, and skill at construction ; and a professional 
man will say through building up professional schools, providing 
no mistake be made about the particular kind of school. Some 
one of wide experience, having a scholar's training and sympathies, 
possessed of a judicial temperament and with decisiveness as well, 
must have the responsibility and the initiative of distributing re- 
sources justly as between the multifarious interests and binding 
them all into an harmonious and effective whole. Difficult as that 
is, it is not the heaviest burden of university leadership. Ideals 
must be upheld and made attractive : they must be sane ideals 
which appeal to real men, — and not only to old men, but to young 
men. There must be no mistaking of dyspepsia for principle, no 
assumption that character grows only when powers fail ; but a 
rational philosophy of life by which men may live as well as 
die. Nor is this all. There must be forehandedness. Someone 
must be charged with the responsibility of peering into the future 
and leading forward. New and yet more difficult roads must be 
broken out. Someone in position to do it must be active in 
initiating things. He must see what will go — and, quite as clearly, 
what will not go. Subtle but fallacious logic — and a vast deal of it — 
must be resisted, greed combated, conceits punctured, resources 
augmented, influences enlarged, forces marshaled for practical 
undertakings, and the whole enterprise made to give a steadily 
increasing service to the industrial, professional, political and moral 
interests of a whole people. 

Then there is the management and guidance of students. One 
may as well complain because this country is a democracy as 
to repine because the sons and daughters of the masses want to 
go to college. There is no ground for regret in the fact that 
our universities are not just like some universities over the seas. 
We have much to learn from them and we are likely to learn 
much. We have quite as much to avoid. It seems too much to 
expect to work un-American ideas, and perhaps loose habits, out 
of American students who study in Europe, when they come home. 
We are different from them because of our circumstances and 
political history, because of our spirit and outlook. That is reason 
enough why our universities are different from theirs. 

It is useless to question whether all who come to the higher 
educational institutions are wise in coming. They are coming. 



46 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

The work will have to be broad enough to meet their needs. Nor 
is it worth while to bewail the fact that all who come are not 
serious students. Their purposes are good enough and serious 
enough according to their lights. Their preparation is what has 
been exacted by the university and provided by the high school. 
Some of them have to be pulled up and pushed along but the 
process often brings out most unexpected results. Students are not 
all angels, but every student is worth being helped by an angel up 
to an angel's place. The task is upon the people who undertake 
to manage universities. Students have to be directed in companies 
but dealt with individually. They may be directed by a rule : when 
they break the rule they must be dealt with by a man. It must 
be a man who can stand pat for all that ought to inhere in a 
university ; but such a man will get on best if in addition 
to being able to stand pat he is able to like boys ; he is likely 
to get on still better if he was once a rather lively boy himself ; 
or. at least, if he is a kind of man for whom a boy with some 
ginger in him can find it in his heart to have not only considerable 
respect but some regard and admiration. 

This is not saying that college students are to be treated like 
children. It is not implied that they are to be excused for being 
ruffians. Quite the contrary is true. They are to be held exactly 
responsible to law and rule and all well known standards of decent 
living. There must be less viciousness in the life of American 
universities or they must and ought to suffer seriously for it. It 
is to be resented and punished far more forcefully than it has 
been. Students who get into this kind of thing and persist in 
staying in are to be punished, even to the point of being thrust 
out — and even though it changes the course of their lives and 
breaks the hearts of fathers and mothers. The good of all is the 
overwhelming consideration. A university is to be a university 
and not something else. Of all institutions it is to stand for char- 
acter and ideals. The universities are not to be closed and all 
youth denied their advantages because a few abuse their privileges. 
The punishment of the bad, if there are any bad, is the protec- 
tion of all the rest. It is an essential safeguard to safe adminis- 
tration and the wholesome living of the crowd. But is it not better 
to hold all the boys we can from going to the dogs bv keeping 
in sympathy and touch with them, than it is to encourage them 
into deviltry through the coldness or the downright dulness or 
nervelessness or cowardliness of an administration? 

The logic of the situation puts this burden upon the president, 
or upon one working with singleness of purpose with him. Likely 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 47 

the president can not deal with all directly, but that is no reason 
why he should not go as far as he may. He must assume responsi- 
bility for management, giving the right turn and inspiration to it. 
It is essentially an executive function. The sun may well avail 
himself of the assistance of a cloud to save his face when a board 
of trustees begins to make preachments filled with benevolent 
advice to a body of students ; and even the man in the moon may 
be excused if he shuts one eye in contemplation, at the spectacle 
of a university senate undertaking to deal w r ith a college boy in a 
scrape. 

So much in reference, to routine. The president who only fol- 
lows routine of course falls short. He is to construct as well as 
administer. He must initiate measures which will result in larger 
facilities, in added offerings and enterprises, in searching out new 
knowledge, in the wider application of principles to work, and 
not only in the usual but in the better training of men and women 
for distinct usefulness in life. He is not only to see that plans 
are within the limits of revenues, that the physical condition of the 
plant improves, that everything is clean and attractive, that the 
faculty is scientifically productive, that the instruction is exact 
and the spirit true ; but he is to take the steps which will keep 
the whole organization moving ahead. He must adopt and pro- 
mote and give full credit for movements initiated by others when 
their propositions are safe and practicable, — but he must also be 
alert in stopping movements which will not go. 

Perhaps more important than all, the president is to declare from 
time to time the best university opinion concerning popular move- 
ments and the serious interests of the state. He must connect 
the university with the life of the multitude and exert its in- 
fluence for the quickening and guidance of that public opinion 
which, as Talleyrand said, is more powerful than all the monarchs 
who ever lived or all the laws which were ever declared. 

The unity and security of a university can only be assured through 
accountability to a central office. While every one is to have free- 
dom to do in his own way the thing he is set to do, so long 
as his wav proves to be a good way, the harmony of the whole 
depends upon the parts fitting together and upon definiteness of 
responsibility and frequency of accountability. No self-respecting 
man is going to administer a great office, or an office responsible 
for great results, and have any doubts about possessing the powers 
necessary or incident to the performance of his work. He will 
have enough to think of without having any doubt upon that sub- 
ject. There need be no fear of his being too much inflated with 



48 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

power. There will be enough to take the conceits out of him and 
keep him upon the earth. If he can not exercise the powers of 
his great office and yet keep steady and sane there is no hope 
for him and he will speedily come to official ruin. It is not a 
matter of uplifting or of inflating a man, but of getting a man who 
can meet the demands of a great situation. 

Of course, no one can realize the hopes which center in a uni- 
versity presidency without being able to work harmoniously with 
others. There must be true deference to the opinions of many and 
scrupulous recognition of the just, though unexpressed, claims of 
all. But he must never forget that administrative freedom is quite 
as inviolable as any other freedom, even in a university. He must 
mark out his official course for himself and bear the responsibility 
of it without cavil. He must expect to suffer criticism and oppo- 
sition, even contumely. He can not expect that the work he has 
to do will make every one happy. It will discomfit many. In 
one way or another they will give him all the trouble they can. 
The protests will be the loudest because of the very acts for 
which his office has been developed. But he may comfort him- 
self with the reflection that if the job were not so heavy they 
would have a cheaper man to do it, and that the extent of the 
opposition is often the measure of real presidential business that 
is being performed. In any event, his only hope is in success, 
and he can not go around the duty which confronts him without 
inevitable failure. Conditions may easily make a mere compro- 
miser of him. If they do, the waves will speedily close over his 
official remains forever. Some choice and magnanimous spirits 
will help him; but he need entertain no doubt that there will be 
plenty more on every side to try out the stuff that is in him, 
and that they will diligently attend to the trying out process until 
enough occurs to convince them that his wisdom, his rational 
conception of his task, his love of justice and sense of humor, 
his constructive planning, his independence, and his fearlessness, 
are sufficient to prove him worthy of as great an opportunity for 
usefulness and honor as ever comes to any man. 

All this calls for a rare man. He ought, in the first place, 
to be reasonably at peace with mankind and in love with youth. 
He must have the gift of organizing and the qualities of leadership. 
He ought to have been trained in the universities, not only for 
the sake of his own scholarship, but that he may be wholly at 
home in their routine and imbued with their purposes. He must 
be moved by public spirit as distinguished from university routine 
or mere scholarly purpose. He must be a scholar — but not neces- 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 49 

sarily in "literature or science or moral philosophy. It is quite 
as well if it is in law, or engineering, or political history. He 
must be sympathetic with all learning. He can no longer hope 
to be a scholar in every study. He can hardly hope to administer 
such a trust or fill such a post without some knowledge of and 
considerable aptitude for law. His sense of justice must be keen, 
his power of discrimination quick, his judgment of men and women 
accurate; his patience and politeness must give no sign of tiring, 
and the strength of his purpose to accomplish what needs to be 
done must endure to the very end. Yet he must determine dif- 
ferences and decide things. He must have the power of expression 
as well as the more substantial attainments. Beyond possessing 
sense, training, outlook, experience, resistive power, decisiveness, 
and aggressiveness, he ought to be a forceful and graceful writer 
and at least an acceptable public speaker. In a word — the presi- 
dent of an American university is bound to be not only one of 
the most profound scholars but quite as much one of the very 
great, all round men of his generation. 



ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESI- 
DENT JAMES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 

Mr Chairman and Men and Women of the University of Illinois: 
The distinguished presence, the impressive procedure, and the 
function and purpose of this great university convocation are 
surely sufficient- to make it memorable. Other gatherings for the 
discussion of many subjects of the highest import to higher edu- 
cation in America have been associated with this assemblage. The 
effort to accompany an installation with an educational advance 
has been evident. The gracious attendance of the representatives 
of many American and of some foreign universities lends very sub- 
stantial assistance to this effort. Taken together, the exercises may 
rival if not surpass any previous undertaking in the interests 
of the higher learning in the Mississippi valley. 

Of very considerable interest to all, the occasion is certainly 
of profound significance to this university. We are now at the 
heart of the business for which we invited so many. We are 
taking a step of the very first magnitude in our affairs. We 
are conferring a very great honor. We are imposing a very great 
burden. It is through the bestowal of a very great office. We 
are come not merely to ratify an appointment or to deliver keys 
but to give a new leader the expression of our confidence and 
the assurance of our help. We would not disguise our understand- 
ing of what it all implies to him, to us, and to all of the interests 
of this institution. We would invest this occasion with all serious- 
ness. With solemnity we pledge our support. Realizing both the 
need and the meaning of it, we offer words of cheer and the 
best wishes which a buoyant and expectant people can lay at the 
feet of a new administration. 

This is not the day for reminiscence, but it is the day for reflec- 
tion, as well as the day of hope. Rational outlook rests upon a 
true understanding of what is and what has been. In university 
building the future can lift high its turrets only upon foundations 
laid sure and true. There is no better exemplification of American 
spirit anywhere than is found in the history of this university. 
Without any aid from nature but a rich soil, without a single 
helpful feature in the landscape, upon almost an exact plain, with- 
out hill or tree or rock or river, it has made a campus as home- 
like and ennobling as any one of us has seen. Without building 
materials in the neighborhood, it has erected buildings at once 

50 



ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESIDENT JAMES 51 

spacious and serviceable. With a school of architecture of its 
own, without close association with the best architecture of the 
world, with considerable of the feeling that a new building belonged 
to an architect who had been trained by the university, and that 
in time every graduate in architecture ought to be represented 
by a building, it has, in one way or another, which need not be 
specified here, worked out or worried out a very respectable col- 
lection of architectural effects. Located between and across the 
border line of two small cities, it has risen above their rivalries, 
made them useful suburbs, and given them a happy mission — 
even the housing of the people of a university. Started in an 
environment not specially conducive to scholarly pursuits, it has 
developed a setting which is beginning to support its work admir- 
ably. Far from the geographical or popular center of the state, 
it has overcome distances and become a conspicuous spot on the 
map of Illinois. Without a large city to draw upon for students, 
even beset with deep prejudices and sharp rivalries, it has filled 
all the highways with happy young men and maidens, coming to 
or going from its work. At a distance from large libraries and 
without free association with the centers of scholarship, and until 
now with very inadequate support, it has built up an instructional 
force exceptionally able at many points and of very satisfactory 
average strength. Under the disadvantages as well as the advan- 
tages of a popular support and a democratic management it has 
become widely celebrated for its unparalleled growth, and has 
fought its way to a very high place in the list of large American 
universities. One hundred out of the one hundred and two coun- 
ties of Illinois, forty-three other states, and eight foreign countries 
are represented in its student body. In the breadth of its offer- 
ings and the measure and the loftiness of its ambitions it is second 
to none. When it was robbed of most of its invested and much 
of its operating funds, it succeeded in three weeks — with the help 
of the Legislature and Governor — in converting its discomfiture 
into better securities than universities ordinarily have, — good, five 
per cent everlasting bonds of the commonwealth of Illinois. Later 
than all neighboring state universities in getting started, and ex- 
ceedingly slow in gaining moneyed support, it has at last won the 
genuine pride and generous confidence of a state which can do 
whatever it will, — for which all of us make most sincere acknowl- 
edgments in the hope of yet larger favors still to come. Drawing 
upon other universities and all other sources of supply for all 
it can get, it is increasins: its contributions to the scholarship of 
the countrv and doing more than was ever foreseen to train the 



52 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

young men and women of a rich and imperial state to the serious 
business of making the most of themselves through intelligent and 
tiring work of every kind and through a rational use of the results 
of commercial and industrial prosperity. 

This state is fortunate in that its state university and its agri- 
cultural and mechanical colleges are being developed together. 
The work of each supports the other. It is producing a very large 
institution, one with broad foundations and innumerable offerings. 
With all of the departments here where there is small need of 
physicians, its medical colleges are where medical men are most 
in demand and at the largest center of medical education in the 
world. All in all, it is accumulating students with a rapidity which 
is creating a responsibility beyond compute. 

We all know this, but it is well to express it. It gives us 
strength. We are equal to it. By common assent and intuitive 
impulse this institution is now to be made great as well as big. 
The state university development in America is one of the very 
greatest as well as the most surprising movements in world edu- 
cation. It is the logical outgrowth of the democratic advance. 
Few will say that the state universities are not already as potential 
as the universities which have preceded them. In opportunities to 
serve a people through the applications of learning to diversified 
life, as well as in the aspiration and the strength to make that service 
great, they are ranking university operations everywhere. Illinois 
expects to lag behind no other state in the generosity and the 
intelligence of her doing for the higher learning. She provides 
the means and calls the best men she can get for her service. Then 
she wants a new advance. She will not temporize with oppor- 
tunity. She will not tolerate excuses. She will go forward. With 
profound regard for all the states around her, with the warmest 
appreciation of the aid she is getting from other universities, and 
the most unqualified assurances of reciprocity, the keynote of this 
great week at the University of Illinois sounds a decided advance 
to higher and stronger ground. 

One who has the gifts and the strength to lead this advance 
is to be envied the opportunity. I wish I could compound the 
thinking and express the reflections and the hopefulness of us 
all. The suggestions, born of my thinking and my experience, 
which bear upon this hour and the future of this university, are 
in these plain and fundamental, briefly stated propositions: 

Serve the commonwealth of Illinois, not only in her industries, 
but in her political theories and practices, in rearing noble ideals 
of true culture, and in strengthening her conception of the moral 



ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESIDENT JAMES 53 

obligations of such a people. Do it when sure of your ground, even 
though it compels the saying of some things which, at the moment, 
many of her people may not like to hear. 

Aid every educational activity, whether public school or parish 
school or proprietary school, whether endowed college or profes- 
sional school, or private or public library, or study club, or what- 
ever else it may be, if it has the purpose of enlarging knowledge 
or extending culture in or out of the schools. Be true to every 
other university. Never forget that meanness defeats itself. In 
education the way to get rich is through enriching others. 

Bring to this university the best scholars who can be procured 
in any part of the world. There are no artificial barriers and no 
political boundaries in the democracy of learning. Pay what you 
have to pay in order to have the best instruction in the country. 
That is one of the leading things for which the last administration 
was disposed to give way to the new one. The old one could have 
gone on in the old way. It was believed that a new leader could 
take some important steps more surely than the old one. If not 
taken, an opportunity will be lost. He is here to fill the gap of 
opportunity to the full. Let the fact be established and let the 
country . come to know that no more new truth is likely to be 
dug out anywhere, and no better instruction provided anywhere, 
than at the University of Illinois. 

Develop young men in the faculties by giving them their oppor- 
tunities ; and assure them just credit for all the work they do. Do 
not stunt them by letting them think that they are so very much 
larger than they really are. 

Enter into student sympathies and share student outlook. Brace 
up the timid and the hesitating. Find ways to put surplus energies 
to useful ends. Give all plenty of good work to do. Forgive the 
ones who are a trifle too active but not so very bad. Let the 
vicious know that there is no place for viciousness in the affairs 
of a university. Command the situation through the stirring of 
sentiment, through the development of opinion, and through re- 
liance upon that moral sense which in the last analysis is always 
overwhelming in a university crowd. 

Let justice and sense stand, whoever falls. Let there be a day 
in court for all. Be as just to a student when a teacher is at fault 
as to a teacher when a student is in trouble. 

Fight for absolute cleanness. Insist that everything shall com- 
port with the purposes of such an institution. Demand that every 
one in the service shall have undivided devotion to the work which 
he undertakes. Avoid expenditures which do not commend them- 



54 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

selves to the good sense of sane and experienced men. Reject all 
extravagancies. When money is expended see that a dollar buys 
the value of a dollar. Stand for nothing until convinced ; shrink 
from nothing merely because some one may be discomfited. 

Mr President, administer your splendid estate, and execute the 
high purpose for which this great aggregation of material things 
and of intellectual and moral forces is maintained. Do it without 
fear or favor, without thinking much of the hazards or of the 
compensations, and the people of the commonwealth of Illinois, 
and the Almighty God, will take care of you. 

The real growth and strength of this university have hardly 
appeared. The future will overshadow the past. Hearts, minds, 
money, boundless energy, the public interests and the common 
pride are all enlisted to carry the University of Illinois to a place 
of the very first significance in American education. All that is 
wanted is a scholarly, a sane, and a fearless leadership. If one 
'Can not supply it, another will. With one accord we think we have 
found the man who can. 

I am transferring to him not only a title but an opportunity; 
not only an office but my hope and my confidence that he may 
enlarge it. I did not impair this office : it is a greater office than it 
used to be. It is as precious a thing as I shall ever have to give. 
Before I could transfer it with cheerfulness and with confidence 
I have been obliged to think more deeply than have many others 
of the needs of the situation here and in another state, and of 
the adaptation of men to differing work. My attachments are no 
stronger there than here. The decision came out of a mental 
process which has tried out feeling and broken some strings. The 
new president has been an all-important factor in the case. But 
I am ready. The attributes of the new leader give me confidence 
and the universal acclaim makes me know that all is well. 

A true son of Illinois ; with the fine lineage of her best pioneers ; 
with native pride in her history ; with scholarly appreciation of 
her resources and of her intellectual development ; with a mature 
and balanced understanding of her needs, as well as with patriotic 
enthusiasm for all that may uplift her ; a severe student, trained 
in the best schools of the world ; a virile teacher ; a publicist of 
wide reputation ; an experienced and trenchant administrator ; we 
envy him the gifts and the opportunity which will let him impress 
lives, shape ends, weave his name into the history of this university, 
and add to the greatness of his state ; and we give him all the 
cheer that can spring out of song, with all the sincerity that can 
breathe through prayer. 



REMARKS AT SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL CONFER- 
ENCE, COLUMBIA, S. C. 
Reprinted from the published proceedings 

Mr President, and You My Friends of the Southern Educa- 
tional Conference: I am sure I should have been very glad indeed 
if my name could have been omitted from the list of speakers, 
because of the lateness of the hour and particularly because we are 
all waiting to hear the concluding speech, by His Excellency, the 
Governor. 

But as the way is open, I am glad to express the pleasure I 
have found in my visit to Columbia and in the proceedings of the 
conference. It is my first visit to Columbia and my first attendance 
upon the conference. I am bound to tell you that I came with 
high expectations. I have experienced southern hospitality before 
and I knew that we would be graciously entertained. I knew you 
would not invite us here unless you were anxious to follow your 
invitation with a sincere and genuine welcome. For the last ten 
years I have been associated with one of the great state univer- 
sities, and that has led me to know something more than I other- 
wise might about the State College of South Carolina, located 
here. I knew that that institution, with other educational activities 
of the city, must have cooperated with the prevailing conditions 
to develop a society of rich and unusual culture at the South 
Carolina capital. Yet, Mr President, I am bound to say that 
some of us surely, and perhaps all of us, have had some object 
lessons in generous hospitality and magnificent kindliness which 
exceeded our expectations and which have made us fast friends 
for life. [Applause] 

I have heard a great deal said from this platform about 
" problems." All earnest people have problems. I do not want 
you to think you have a monopoly of them in the South. In the 
great metropolis of the Union there are educational problems 
quite as serious as any in the Southern States. I suppose that 
in the heart of the city of New York there are three quarters 
of a million of people who know little or nothing of democratic 
government or of American institutions. They hardly know the 
English language at all. They are as yet foreign to our life and 
our outlook. They are to be absorbed into our citizenship. Their 

5*- 



56 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

children, and they have lots of them, are to be trained in our 
schools. And those very people have a considerable part in estab- 
lishing and managing the schools which are to do that work. If 
educational problems made people poor, I suspect that each of us 
would be as poor as any two of you put together. [Laughter] 

We who have been together in this conference understand each 
other pretty well. We all have some form of citizenship in the 
democracy of learning. We know something of the fundamental 
principles of that institution'. We have come down from the 
North not to parade our intellectual estate or to patronize you, 
but to learn something and if possible to give you a word of cheer 
and enrich ourselves by the giving. In the democracy of learn- 
ing, the only way to get gain is to give away as much as one 
can. [Laughter and applause] About the only way one can get 
much in such work as this is by lifting all the rest as much as 
he can. In the democracy of learning there are no political, 
sectarian, state or sectional lines. AVe all mingle together to put 
in our experiences and our thinking and to take out of the common 
accumulations whatever we most need. Before the good-fellow- 
ship, the generosity, the energy, and the enthusiasm generated in 
these conferences, difficulties give way and the mountains shrink 
into mole hills. [Applause] 

Educational work in America is unique. This is the land of 
opportunity. It is the national policy that every man and woman, 
every boy and girl, shall have a right to an education suitable 
to his situation. Every one is to have a chance to lift himself 
above the situation in which he was born. Even more, — it is the 
national belief that it is a sound national policy to aid and encourage 
every one to make the most of himself. The more we can make 
of each one of the individual units in our citizenship the greater 
and stronger does the nation become. All the nations do not 
accept that. In some lands statesmen are afraid of it. But we 
believe in it. It is the plan of the North and it is the plan of 
the South. The same thing that brings us into common fellowship 
and stirs our common sympathies in our educational conferences 
distinguishes the American nation in the world. [Applause] 

T have been especially interested in the reports made to the 
conference by the different state superintendents of schools from 
nearly all of the Southern States. I was prepared for a good 
showing for it recently devolved upon me to review, for publica- 
tion, the educational legislation of the last year in all of the states, 
and from that examination I knew that there was an educational 
revival sweeping across the Southland [applause], but the definite 



REMARKS AT SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL CONFERENCE 57 

reports of new buildings, more teachers, enlarged salaries, im- 
proved preparation of teachers, and all of the accessories of a 
better school system are most gratifying. And let me say that 
nothing in this conference has stirred my admiration more than 
the able and heroic treatment of the matter of school attendance 
and of the illiteracy consequent upon nonattendance, presented 
to us by Superintendent W. H. Hand of Chester in this state. 
[Applause] One must face the real facts when he would accom- 
plish a great work. He who knows a subject of importance to his 
people and tells them the truth even though it be distasteful, renders 
the public a distinct service and deserves the highest commenda- 
tion. [Applause] 

I must not detain you longer. I thank you with all my heart 
for all that my journey to this beautiful old city and to this con- 
ference has meant to me, and I trust that the opening year may be 
surcharged with pleasure and progress for all of you. [Applause] 



SYNOPSIS OF REMARKS AT STATE TEACHERS ASSO- 
CIATION, 1905, SYRACUSE, N. Y. 

The Commissioner opened the discussion by a casual allusion 
to an article on Needed Educational Legislation printed on the 
official program, and relating to teachers' salaries, pensions, 
permanency of tenure, etc., and remarked that the article did not 
seem to be " surcharged with spiritual aim." He thought such 
matters all right as mere incidents, but not entitled to highest rank 
in the deliberations of a great state association of teachers. He 
would help increase the salaries of teachers whenever the oppor- 
tunity came, and would promote pension legislation whenever there 
could be any general or logical agreement upon the subject, but 
was hardly prepared to put the major share of productivity into 
such matters. As to permanency of tenure, there was not much 
more to be desired. 

Dr Draper proceeded to say that since the unification act went 
into effect the time had been largely occupied in combining and 
reorganizing the Department forces and methods of procedure. 
This difficult task had been about completed and the Department 
was now ready to take up some new educational business. Not 
much had been accomplished as yet, but the time had come for a 
distinct revival of educational activity. 

He thought that, speaking generally, the teaching force had 
improved decisively in the last two decades, and not much was 
necessary in that connection except to keep on doing what had 
already been commenced, with such occasional incidental changes 
in plans as experience would suggest. 

The Commissioner thought the Department and all interested in 
the educational work of the State should join forces to accomplish 
the following ends which he discussed : 

1 Better professional supervision of the teaching in the country 
schools. 

2 The raising of low grade secondary schools up to the standards, 
whether they were large schools or small ones. 

3 The more complete enforcement of compulsory attendance 
and child labor laws with a view to the reduction of illiteracy, 
which was much too great in the State, and particularly in the 
rural districts. 

58 






REMARKS AT STATE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION 59 

4 A more distinct college and university influence in all of the 
middle and lower schools and in all of the other educational activi- 
ties of the State. 

5 A stronger feeling of fraternity between public and private 
schools and between all agencies for uplifting the intellectual 
level. 

The Commissioner spoke of the work the State Department was 
doing in the asylums and prisons ; also of the work in the way of 
establishing and developing libraries and other agencies for aiding 
people to improve themselves outside of the schools. 

He asked all teachers to study in the next year the subject of 
business and trade schools, with particular reference to young 
children who will probably not go to high school and almost 
certainly will not go to college. He thought something more 
decisive and logical would have to be done in this direction and 
the attitude of the State Department should be taken advisedly and 
should accord with the best sentiment of the teachers of the State. 

The Commissioner spoke of the great need of a new State 
building for the State Department, including the State Library 
and State Museum, suggesting the stimulating influence of such a 
building upon the intellectual interests of the State, and asking 
the support of all in securing it. 

In conclusion, Dr Draper urged the consolidation of all edu- 
cational interests and the truest cooperation between all educational 
forces, giving assurance of the best help, without fear or favor, 
that the Education Department could give and soliciting the best 
support that all interested could give the Department. 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 

grant's birthday exercises, state normal college 
albany, n. y. 

On the bluff overlooking the old town of Galena, in the very 
northwestern corner of Illinois, stands a small and very ordinary 
brick house. Nothing distinguishes it from other houses that are 
common in the neighborhood. While this house, in that place, 
forty-six years ago was doubtless a comfortable habitation, yet the 
unpainted front, the small panes in the windows, the wooden steps, 
the little front door, and the narrow hall with the steep stairs com- 
ing down to the entrance, tell us plainly that it was not above the 
common run and that the people who then lived in it must have been 
either in trying circumstances or exceedingly unpretentious. 

In the summer of i860 a man, wife, and four children — three boys 
and a girl, the oldest eleven years of age — became tenants of this 
house. The man was thirty-eight years of age. He had been born 
in Ohio of very intelligent and well to do, but not conspicuous, 
parents. In his boyhood his father operated a tannery and owned 
a farm. The lad detested the tannery, did not like manual work 
anyway, but had to do it and preferred that upon the farm, and 
particularly that in which horses were used. He went to school 
but little. In one way and another he managed to travel about more 
and gained wider general knowledge than any other boy in town. 
At seventeen his father procured him an appointment to West Point. 
He did not want to go, but his father provided the necessary reso- 
lution. He showed but little interest in strictly military affairs. 
His study of the tactics was not. enthusiastic and the drill seemed a 
nuisance. When made a sergeant, the seventeenth, and there were 
only eighteen in the battalion, he did so poorly that they lost little 
time in making him a private again. But his sound character, his 
readiness in mathematics, and his superior horsemanship saved him, 
and in 1843 ne graduated, number twenty-one in a class of thirty- 
nine. 

Stationed at Jefferson Barracks at St Louis, as a brevet second 
lieutenant of the 4th Infantry, he employed the time he could get 
away from the routine of the post in cultivating the acquaintance of 
a worthy young woman, whose family was of considerable promi- 
nence and lived comfortably five miles out of town. He had been 
so assiduous about this that when he was ordered away to the war 
in Mexico she promised to become his wife. 

60 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 6 1 

He thought the war with Mexico was unholy, but he followed 
the flag and gained some distinction as a strategist and a straight, 
hard fighter. The war over, he married and then served with the 
troops upon the Pacific coast until 1854. The army in time of 
peace had no attractions for him, certainly none which compensated 
for isolation from his wife and children. He became a captain, but 
the pay of that rank would not support his family on the other side 
of the mountains and the enforced separation became wholly intoler- 
able. He resigned his commission and came home. The reasons 
for resigning and the manner of his life for the next six years have 
been called in question by some writers. There is no reason for it. 
The impulses which led to his retirement from the army were in his 
nature and they are worthy of commendation. Aside from that, he 
was not in strong health : he inherited some tendencies to consump- 
tion. He has told us of his reasons for leaving the army and of his 
manner of life in the following years. His word removes uncer- 
tainty. He engaged in unimportant, natural, honorable enterprises 
which he hoped would enable him to live with and support his 
family. His undertakings did not succeed and he went to Galena 
to share in the leather trade with his father and brothers. 

Old residents of Galena say he made but little impression upon 
the town. He was quiet, unobtrusive, serious. Once or twice he 
was asked to look after the procession at a local celebration, and did 
it noiselessly and well. Beyond this he was unknown and little seen 
except in the store and on his coming and going between that and 
the house on the hill. On these walks he was frequently accom- 
panied by some of his children, and at times had a basket on his arm. 
for he did the family marketing and then carried the meats and 
vegetables himself, according to the custom of the time and the 
place. 

The woman of the family was substantial, educated above the 
average woman of the time, a good mother and a genuine housewife. 
The children were like other children. The family life moved for- 
ward in the ordinary way. We can readily believe that there was 
much to discourage, for there was nothing to foreshadow future 
prominence. But we know that the family was happy, for it was 
bound together by love which could endure stress and storm. 

On the bluff overlooking the Hudson and the Palisades, in the 
upper part of the city of New York, upon ground at once pictur- 
esque and historic, hard by one of the very first of American uni- 
versities, stands a magnificent mausoleum. It compares favorably 
with any structure in the great city, or indeed in the land. The 
tombs of Britain's great men at Westminster, of Napoleon in the 



62 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

heart of Paris, of the Hohenzollern kings at Potsdam, of Washing- 
ton at Mount Vernon, of Lincoln at Springfield, are not more 
magnificent, more dignified, more impressive. It is a voluntary 
testimonial to a great national character. The states contended 
with each other for the honor of providing it ; but the people estab- 
lished it without invoking any governmental function. In the crypt 
under the great dome stand, side by side, a noble pair of granite 
coffins. One holds all that was mortal of the father at Galena, and 
the other, by his special stipulation, has since received the body of 
the mother. Over all, in heroic letters, is the name of "GRANT." 

Between the modest home at Galena and the great mausoleum at 
Morningside Heights there developed a unique career of universal 
human interest. It extended through a period of twenty-five years. 
It was a decisive factor in making the course of history in America. 
It will never cease to influence the thought and the life of the world. 

We can not today trace all the lines or fill in all the details of that 
marvelous career. The picture is a completed one and our country- 
men are familiar with it. The purpose of the hour is to point out 
the qualities which, when the opportunity came, led that career to 
move out of obscurity, to increase steadily in volume and in power, 
and to push through the gravest obstacles and the severest criticism 
to the very pinnacle of world fame with such apparent ease and 
such clockwork naturalness as to surprise mankind. 

There is no need to idealize the character of General Grant : in 
its humanity and its reality it appeals to the world. His name and 
his fame became great because of the things he did. But what 
he did was not by chance. It came of qualities which were inherent 
in his character. Those qualities were sharpened by training and 
seasoned by hard experience, it is true. But they were peculiarly 
his own, and they were so independent and so unexpected, were 
expressed in ways so unlike those commonly associated with con- 
spicuous military achievement, and were so invariably successful 
that the character which embodied them speedily advanced to first 
place in the esteem of his countrymen and the thought of mankind. 

The conditions which were to require him, to find him, and to 
make him very great through service to his country, had not arisen 
when he went to make his home in the Illinois town. They came 
in the following year. When they came he was the first to recog- 
nize them. He began military operations at once. He organized 
a company, and rejected the proffer of its command. He offered 
his service to the government and expressed some confidence in his 
ability to command a regiment. His overture was overlooked. He 
went to the capital of Illinois and engaged in military work. Some- 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 63 

thing has been said about his return to the army being- accidental; 
about the possibility of his being out of the Civil War altogether. 
He recognized no such accident or possibility. Circumstances of 
time or place or rank were uncertain. He had some feeling about 
what he could best do or about what might belong to him. He was 
ready to pocket it if need be, but not unless it need be. He has told 
us that not for a moment did he doubt of being in the army through 
the war; that in war one does not have to ask leave of anybody to 
fight for his country. As a fact he was in the service from the very 
beginning. In a few weeks he was commanding a regiment, and 
in a few months an army. 

First and above all the character of Grant was sincere. In mili- 
tary affairs his judgment was entirely confident and almost unerring; 
in business matters it might slip ; but it was always sincere and 
just, always natural and always genuine, always modest and 
steadfast. 

The world had associated glittering show and spectacular effect 
with military genius. He hated them. He wore nothing in the way 
of a uniform beyond the requirements of the regulations. His dress 
in active service conformed to the rough conditions. It hardly 
seemed to be a uniform. There was little or nothing about it to 
sustain his rank. In his eating and sleeping he accepted the lot of 
the ordinary soldier. In his work he could outlast them all. He 
loved a good horse. He never exhibited himself on horseback. 
There was no riding along the lines before the onset, no cavorting 
on parade. There was no parade unless for discipline. But he 
could ride through wind and storm, mud and slush, days and nights 
together, sick or well, to accomplish military ends. No reality ever 
did or ever will appeal to the American heart more than that of the 
commanding general, upon a good horse, in the Wilderness, in the 
pelting rain and sleet, in the now historic blue overcoat of the 
common soldier, with the wounded and fluttering life of the nation 
in his keeping, yet as calm as a summer morning, as precise as clock- 
work, as confident as fate, as grim as death itself. 

The first years of the Civil War, at the fields of military interest 
in the east, were marked by dress and parade, by marching and 
countermarching, by the pomp of officers, the multiplicity of orders, 
the ready assurances of early and overwhelming victories. But not 
much ground was gained. Commanders lacked aggressiveness or 
feared failure, and when the sentiment of the country forced a move- 
ment the slaughter was appalling, and without compensating results. 
The gloom was deep and the feeling ominous. 

In these conditions an obscure man, without bluster, had worked 
his way up to an opportunity in the west. He got poor encourage- 



64 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

ment from his superiors ; jealousies assailed and intrigue encom- 
passed him, but he seized the opportunity all the same. He drove 
the enemy out of Fort Henry, took possession, and moved at once 
upon Fort Donaldson. He had perhaps fifteen thousand men : there 
were twenty-one thousand defending the fort. He invited battle 
upon an open field, without avail. He made ready for the assault 
by land and water. Just as the advance was ordered he received a 
note from the Confederate commander — his old comrade at West 
Point and in the Mexican War — asking for delay, and the appoint- 
ment of commissioners to arrange capitulation. Any other man 
would have accepted the overture with joy. He thought one could 
settle the terms easier than two, and better without commissioners 
than with them, and replied, " No terms except an unconditional 
and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move 
immediately upon your works." The surrender came instantly and 
upon his terms. A portion of the garrison had escaped in the 
■ night, but sixteen thousand men marched out, stacked arms, ate his 
rations, and were sent to the north as prisoners of war. The man 
who had done it said nothing beyond his official reports, and they 
were the briefest possible statements of facts, devoid of self-lauda- 
tion, free from gush and speculation, but filled with the confidence 
and outlook of one who could accomplish things even upon the 
dread field of an overwhelming fratricidal war. 

The surprise of the country was only exceeded by its joy. Could 
it really be that a man had done something of consequence, and 
without talking about it? How the great heart of the nation 
throbbed at the news of a substantial. and unclouded victory! And 
how the people stood amazed at the silence and the modesty of the 
victor ! What an official babel there must have been when a man 
became conspicuous by his very silence ! But there were other 
officers and older generals in the service who had not planned all 
this. There was enough of official consternation and shameful self- 
love in high military places to remove the man from command; 
but the voice of the people soon put him beyond danger from such 
things. The nation gave him its admiration and its confidence. 
His brief reply to Buckner became the slogan of the Union cause 
in the camps, and at the battle front of the armies, and in the homes 
and upon the hustings of the people. Could the man sustain all 
this? Had he the qualities which could stand such prosperity? 
Steadiness and quiet, with Shiloh, and then Vicksburg with its 
thirty thousand prisoners of war, soon gave the answer. After 
Chattanooga and Missionary Ridge he was accepted as the coming 
general in chief of all the armies. Congressional thanks, and 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 65 

medals, and presentation swords, and promotions, came speedily, 
A special rank was created for him, and before long he was moved 
to the center of the fearful carnage in the east and made commander 
in chief of all the armies of the Union. He had himself become 
greater and stronger through the two years of wondrous doing. 
The armies and the people had been educated also. Steadily, 
silently, confidently, he moved on to the mighty climax, leading 
greater armies, exercising larger powers, assuming weightier re- 
sponsibilities, forcing heavier battles, winning yet grander victories. 
Spottsylvania, Five Forks, the Wilderness, Petersburg, Appomatox 
— these brief words tell the fearful and the wondrous story. 

It is certainly an inspiration to see an obscure man, in a brief 
period and without favoring circumstances, recognized as the fore- 
most military commander produced by the world in a long cycle of 
time. Other qualities than sincerity were necessary to make this 
possible. What were they? 

He proved to be a great organizer. The objective point in his 
military organization was the highest efficiency of the individual 
soldier. The soldiers of his legions were citizens and freemen. 
He knew the value of patriotic devotion and of free and safe indi- 
vidual initiative in the ranks ; he understood the methods which 
would produce such efficiency as could be secured from mercenaries, 
and what other treatment would gain that higher efficiency which 
marks the cooperative work of heroic and conscientious freemen. 
In his own character he combined the spirit of the patriotic citizen 
with the ways of the trained and experienced officer of .the regular 
army. Commander and men were fighting together, not for pay, 
not for conquest, not for a soldier's fame, but for the freedom of the 
oppressed, for the life of the Republic, for the rehabilitation and 
the continuance of democratic government in the world. His mili- 
tary discipline recognized and reckoned with this great fact. Free- 
dom of opportunity and adequate support, forceful and trustworthy 
leadership with a modicum of control would enable such men to 
swing the sword of the nation to the overthrow of its enemies, and 
then bind up the wounds and bring together the sections for the yet 
greater unfolding of its unparalleled career. 

The supply and medical departments of his armies had first and 
best care. He knew the need of rations and the worth of shoes. 
The law of the camp and the march made for whatever comfort 
could be obtained, for freedom of action, for self-control, for 
enthusiasm, for elasticity, and for fighting power. His sense of 
justice was clear and balanced, quick and stern. Fie never spoke 
in sepulchral tones to make himself impressive. He was never 



66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

known to be excited and never heard to use an oath. He tolerated 
no nonsense : he accepted no lame excuses : he regarded no rank. 
He would remove a division commander in the front of the battle 
line if the facts seemed to require it : he would do it with real and 
manifest regret, but he would not hesitate about it. If in time he 
found he had made a mistake or gone too far, he would have genuine 
satisfaction in making the best amends he could in the presence of 
the army, or before the country. He acted upon small matters and 
large matters with equal readiness. He dealt with every problem 
presented : he decided at once : his ways were modest and quiet : 
his words were few, but every one counted: when he had spoken 
the thing seemed to be settled. He was serious but he did not 
trouble himself about results. He knew his ground and he knew his 
men. There might be an immaterial slip here and there, but the 
general results were the ones he wanted. The armies solidified : 
they grew in strength and waxed in spirit: they gained veteran 
form. Led by such a citizen and such a soldier, the Union Army 
of citizen soldiers became the most intelligent and the most scien- 
tific, the most extended, the freest, and yet the most homogenous 
and effective fighting machine in all history. 

Grant proved to be a strategist. He knew personally or he knew 
all about the leading men to whom he was opposed, and reasoned 
with much accuracy as to the course they would take. He studied 
the field and saw where the vantage ground would be. He seemed 
able to see from the beginning to the end of a campaign, and events 
happened as he expected. He seldom got into a tight place. If 
he was surprised, no one knew it. ■ He moved his forces with 
celerity and in ways which ensured the results he had planned. 

But if he was a strategist by intuition, the quality was not the 
factor he depended on most to gain his triumphs. His battles 
were won by straight, hard fighting. He took the initiative and 
forced the issue. He gave his enemy no rest. He never seemed 
to care about what his enemy might do, and always reasoned that 
the fellows on the other side were as tired and certainly as scared 
as he was himself. No one will ever know how he would have con- 
ducted a defensive campaign. He was fitted by nature to lead 
offensive campaigns. He did not rest when a campaign was won. 
Before one end was gained he had started towards another. His 
self-confidence was and is startling. In the Vicksburg campaign 
he called in the division commanders and asked their opinions. He 
did not agree with them and he disregarded their conclusions, and 
says in his " Memoirs " that that was as near as he ever came to a 
council of war. He was quite accustomed to close his brief report 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 67 

of a battle won by saying what would be done next and at once. 
This trait appeared early and remained to the close of his military 
activity. Nothing appalled him. In the midst of awful events, 
when the intricacies of the situation were paralyzing and the com- 
motion distracting, when tens of thousands of lives and the fate of 
the nation seemed to depend upon what he did, he wrote his orders 
and reports with readiness, clearness, and confidence most amazing. 

Hear anew his words to the War Department in the darkest hour 
of the Wilderness campaign : " We have ended the sixth day of very 
hard fighting. The result up to this time is very much in our favor. 
But our losses have been heavy, as well as those of the enemy. We 
have lost to this time eleven general officers killed, wounded and 
missing, and probably twenty thousand men. I think the loss of 
the enemy must be greater. I am now sending back all my wagons 
for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and propose to 
fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." 

He set at naught the science of warfare laid down in the books. 
He was criticized for it. He hunted and haunted the enemy. He 
sought battle on terms equal or unequal. Again and again he 
hurled the legions of the Union against a brave, and alert, and 
desperate foe. The slaughter was heartrending. At home, a 
thousand miles from danger, the weaklings quailed and the poltroons 
called him a butcher. Nothing could be more outrageous. There 
was not a coarse or a gross thing in his character. No man was 
ever moved by a spirit more gentle, or directed by feelings more 
tender. He hated war. He realized his responsibility and knew 
for what he stood. He felt that the lives of his armies, and to an 
extent the lives of his enemies, were in his hands. He was an 
economist in human life, and a conservator of human sorrow. He 
knew that the quicker the order, the heavier the onset, the hotter the 
pursuit, the sooner would the bright sun. of peace break through the 
awful clouds, and shed its light over a Republic which had proved 
its right to live. 

The inside character of Grant is revealed in the close of the war 
even clearer than in its conduct. He had taken for the guide of his 
personal conduct the motto, " Treat your friend so that if he be- 
comes your enemy he can do you no harm, and treat your enemy so 
that he may become your friend without humiliation." He acted 
upon it in all the events of his military career. It barred familiari- 
ties on the one side and left no room for jealousies on the other. No 
one ever doubted his independence: no one ever dreamed of coerc- 
ing him. But the commanders of armies, Sherman, Sheridan, 
Thomas, McPherson, and a host of others great in our history, for- 
5 



68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

got that their training had been broader and their experience greater 
than his, as they gave him their friendship and submitted to his 
clearer vision, his surer guidance, his more unerring justice. So 
it was in the momentous events which marked the very climax of 
his military career. When the glad hour of surrender came he 
yielded all that a chivalrous and generous soul could give. He did 
what he could to make peace real, and to have industry and pros- 
perity follow in the footsteps of peace. But he knew his ground 
and stood to it. When an erratic President would disavow his 
parole of the insurgent armies and try their leaders for treason, he 
threatened to resign his place at the head of the army and espouse 
the cause of his former enemies. When Sherman made terms with 
Johnson, which mixed political with military matters, because upon 
the' march to the sea he had been out of touch with the authorities 
for many weeks ; when Stanton charged Sherman with treason, and 
the country was in an uproar, and the government ordered Grant to 
hasten to Sherman's headquarters, take command of his army and 
renew hostilities, the General in Chief slipped down into the Caro- 
linas, set Sherman straight, told him how to fix the matter himself, 
and left before the army or the enemy knew of his presence. All 
that he said and all that he did in those days, so great in our history, 
was guided by generosity to his brothers in arms, by his keen sense 
of justice to all the world, and by the longing of his soul for a 
genuine and lasting peace. 

Doubtless the fame of Ulysses S. Grant will for all time rest 
mainly upon his military achievements. Great as those achieve- 
ments were, however, they are very far from constituting the sum 
of his service to the country. He was twice nominated to the presi- 
dency without a dissenting voice in the national convention, and 
twice elected by overwhelming popular majorities. History has not 
yet done, but will in time do, his two terms in the presidency ade- 
quate justice. No executive ever stood for the dignity and integrity 
of the Union more steadfastly than he, or did it in more troublous 
times. 

He followed a President who was not in sympathy with his party, 
or any party, whose erratic qualities had practically paralyzed the 
executive departments of the government for four years. Nothing 
had been done towards reconstructing governments in the insurrec- 
tionary states, nothing towards recovering the law where war had 
overthrown it, nothing towards settling the obligations entailed by 
the war and resuming the normal business standards and financial 
methods of peace, nothing towards resuming the relations of 
brotherhood and restoring a true Union, nothing towards adjusting 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 69 

the strained relations which the unusual incidents of the war had 
made with many foreign powers. There were scandals touching 
the federal service. The President may have been too confiding. 
He knew more of military men with their trained obedience to 
regime than of men who make their living out of politics. On all 
sides the hatreds were deep, the controversies acrimonious, the out- 
look overcast and foreboding. 

The man was in a new place, and military ways would no longer 
suffice. But the fundamental qualities of his character, his sim- 
plicity, and his genuineness, still served him. He held opinions and' 
expressed them. He exercised the veto power freely. He sat at 
the head of the council table, every inch the President. After full 
opportunity for discussion, the quiet man at the head of the table 
exerted a decisive influence upon the result. There was new aggres- 
siveness in the routine of administration. The star route thieves 
were punished. Irresponsible clans, which met new conditions and 
much provocation with unlawful and murderous methods, were 
hunted down. The moonshine distilleries were destroyed. The 
government mails and the government engineers began to go freely 
on their way. The feeling that there was a federal power strong 
enough to protect its officers and agents in the performance of their 
work, and honest enough to punish those who abused its trust, began 
to abound in the land. 

But this is far from being all. Reconstruction of the dismantled 
governments in the insurrectionary states went forward. There was 
great bitterness it is true. There were many mistakes undoubtedly. 
The conditions were unprecedented. It was the accepted belief that 
the control of the South could not at once be placed in the hands 
which had but just prostrated all government there. The present 
understandings were impossible then. The men through whom 
the administration had to act were frequently a hard lot. But 
reconstruction went forward all the same. Before the end of his 
second administration the Soldier President saw the legal and con- 
stitutional union of the states completely restored. 

Happily the immaterial things in administration, the things which 
cause the most commotion because all can talk about them, are in 
time* forgotten. The great things undertaken by a steady soul and 
a free hand remain and become greater. There were great things 
done by President Grant which will become yet greater in the light 
of history. He helped on popular education : the excellent scientific 
work of the government is largely traceable to his sympathetic 
feeling: he inaugurated a humane and rational treatment of our 
Indian wards : he was the first President to stand for reform in 



70 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

appointments, promotion on the basis of merit, and protection in the 
civil service. The fifteenth amendment, giving citizenship, regard- 
less of color, the logical sequence of our political theories and of 
emancipation, became a part of the Constitution in his first term. 

While legal rehabilitation was going forward, the outlines of a 
new Union were shaped and the spirit of the new Union was 
tempered by the sense and the sympathy of the President. The 
chief instrument of war became the main reliance of peace. 

A concrete example, which may never have been in print, will 
illustrate. Just after General Grant became President, at the hey- 
day of patriotic exultation, the Republican members of the Senate 
determined in conference to erect in the city of Washington a more 
elaborate memorial of the triumph of the Union than had been 
dreamed of before. The intention was to represent all the forces 
of the Nation — the Congress, the regular and volunteer armies, the 
navy, the auxiliary organizations, and all the rest, which had com- 
bined to overthrow the Rebellion, in a costly and enduring group 
-of statuary which should signify the fact to future generations. It 
was easily settled in the party caucus that the figure of General 
Grant should typify the regular army in this group. Then a com- 
mittee was appointed to wait upon the President and ask his cooper- 
ation in the enterprise and his advice as to other figures which might 
be included. A member of the committee has since described the 
interview to me. The impatience of the President was scarcely con- 
cealed while the plan was being unfolded to him. As soon as it was 
laid bare he said with much feeling that the scheme was in his 
judgment a bad one, that he had no claim upon his countrymen 
beyond that of all other men and women who had done what they 
could, that the last things the nation needed were reminders of the 
war, that the representatives and the people of the South were to 
enjoy Washington with the representatives and the people of the 
North, and that nothing should be erected in the streets of that city 
which would be disagreeable to any section or class of the people, 
and that the committee must be assured not only that the judgment 
of the President was opposed to their conception but that the official 
attitude of the President would be positively antagonistic to it. 
That ended the particular matter, but the incident illustrates quali- 
ties which were inherent in a great man. 

Two great, conspicuous acts in national statesmanship will forever 
do honor to the sound judgment and testify of the personal courage 
of President Grant in civic administration. Each of these acts 
requires a book for adequate exploitation. They must be passed 
with a paragraph. 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 7 1 

The first was the complete settlement of our troubles with Great 
Britain, growing out of the unsympathetic attitude of many leaders 
of the party in power in English politics during our Civil War, and 
the consequent building (in English ports) of the Confederate cruis- 
ers, which in our sore straits had taken the attention of our armed 
vessels away from the suppression of the Rebellion and driven our 
merchant marine from the seas. For years our State Department 
had been asserting the claims of American citizens to reparation. 
The demands had been met by ridicule in the English press and dis- 
dain in the English foreign office. The American jingoes talked 
war. The President caused our claims to be asserted with dignity 
and directness, but he avowed his confidence that the time would 
come when the English sense of justice, and the desirability of 
international comity, would lead to a recognition of our demands. 
War for the collection of money was unthinkable. He neither 
sneaked nor blustered. His words made a more profound impres- 
sion abroad than at home. When the Franco-Prussian War 
threatened the equilibrium of Europe, apprehension quickened the 
English sense of international justice. A joint high commission 
was appointed to take the matter up. When the commission met 
the British representatives refused to proceed, or even to consider 
the arbitration of the subject, if indirect damages were to be insisted 
upon. Direct damages meant the loss directly resulting from the 
destruction of property, and were finally measured at fifteen million 
five hundred thousand dollars. Indirect damages covered the cost 
of the prolongation of the war, smart money for injured feelings, 
and the like, and were estimated at from two to three thousand 
millions of dollars. The talking element of the dominant party 
was for the larger demands : the fellows who, in the main, fight but 
with their tongues were for war : the opposition party was for any- 
thing to harass and sever the dominant party. The President said 
we could not honorably demand what Britain could not honorably 
pay, and that we should be content with an expression of regret and! 
the payment of the direct losses. There was a great political 
uproar. There was intrigue in the administration councils. But 
Grant had his way. His way recalled Mr Motley from the English 
mission, and removed Senator Sumner from the chairmanship of 
the committee on foreign relations of the Senate, and precipitated 
such a breach in his party that a large element refused to support 
him for reelection. He had his way all the same: and his way 
secured fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars for American 
claimants, a suitable apology from the government of Great Britain, 
modifications of the law of the his^h seas which have come to be 



72 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

recognized by all the nations, and a firmer peace with the mother 
country and all the world. And his way resulted in his reelection 
with a decisiveness both unexpected and unprecedented. 

The other great act of General Grant's presidency was the veto 
of the bill further inflating the currency and further deferring the 
time for making good the promise of the government to redeem its 
paper obligations in coin. His trial was a sore one. The times 
were hard. The country had just passed through a financial panic. 
The demand for more circulating currency was imperative. The 
apparent necessities of party were urgent. A clear majority of 
the cabinet, of his party associates in Congress, and doubtless of the 
rank and file of the party which had twice made him President, 
hoped the bill would be signed. The President listened. At the 
last hour he went to his library late at night and all by himself he 
wrote one message to Congress signifying his reluctant approval of 
the bill, and another vetoing it. He made each paper as strong as 
he could. He was trying himself. .When through, he determined 
that the veto message was the more logical and sound. He sent 
it in. The integrity, the business sense of the country came quickly 
to the support of his attitude. That message advanced the credit 
of the country in every market of the world and strengthened the 
foundations of a system of national finance capable of supporting 
the industrial and commercial evolution of our rapidly accumulating 
population. It did more. It put a premium upon moral courage 
and developed more steadiness and stamina in the homes, and the 
shops, and the factories, and the centers of trade throughout the 
land. And it gained us larger ' respect at every seat of learning 
and at every political capital in the world. 

In a tour around the world, following his presidency, the General 
received every mark of respect and honor that the people and the 
governments of other nations could show him, and reached home, 
by way of the Pacific, amid the universal acclaim of his countrymen. 

So warm and enthusiastic was the expression of regard that mis- 
guided party leaders conjured with his great name once again for 
the presidency. The move was not of his seeking. His attitude 
was that of modest and passive acquiescence in the wishes of his 
people. But the results were acrimonious, humiliating, in some 
ways tragic. 

But his fine metal never lost its splendid edge. The casual 
acquaintance which it had been my privilege to establish with him 
when serving as a member of the committee of the Legislature 
appointed for his reception and entertainment in 1881 made it proper 
for me to pay my respects to him when we met in a Chicago hotel 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 73 

in 1882. As we conversed there came a knock at the door. Open- 
ing it, the General read the name upon a card that was handed him 
and instantly said to the boy, " You will tell this person that I do 
not want to see him." Partly closing the door and then opening 
it again he repeated, " Boy, please remember precisely what I say : 
you will tell this person that I do not want to see him." His man- 
ner was as unruffled as the summer sun. " Why did you not say 
that you were engaged," inquired Mrs Grant. " Because, if I had 
he would have come again," was the reply. Wifely interest forced 
an immediate though somewhat reluctant and embarrassing explana- 
tion : " Well, that was a reporter from a daily paper which wants an 
interview," the General said. " Yesterday this paper abused Presi- 
dent Arthur for appointing Colonel Walter Evans of Louisville as 
Commissioner of Internal Revenue, on the ground that he had once 
supported me. The paper has the right to condemn the President 
and also the right to criticize me, but when it condemns the Presi- 
dent for nothing but because he appoints an old and entirely worthy 
friend of mine to office it is time that I resent it." Who shall say 
that this was not proper discrimination prompted by commendable 
self-respect ? 

His remaining years were encompassed by bitter suffering and 
sorrow. He thought his sons might be as successful in the business 
as he had been in the military world. Who can blame him for 
that? He gave his name to a firm in Wall street embracing his 
sons and another. The other proved a polished scoundrel and pulled 
down financial ruin and debt and intense humiliation upon an 
honored head. The General gathered up -all he had, and pawned 
his medals and presentation swords, to meet his obligations. But 
this was by no means the sum of his suffering. 

Although his sturdy will gave him great endurance, his body was 
never strong. Pain was very familiar to him and he seemed spe- 
cially susceptible to accidents and hurts. Many times in his cam- 
paigns he had to rise above serious bodily suffering to command 
the issue of great events. In 1884 he had a fall which compelled 
him to go upon crutches for months, and from which he never 
recovered. The last time I saw him was when he came into Mr 
Blaine's room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on crutches to pay his 
respects to the candidate of his party, although the two men had 
never been in personal accord. Just after this, disease in its 
dreadest form fastened upon him. 

He commenced to write the history of his life, that the proceeds 
might provide his family the means of living. The dread mes- 
senger stood at his elbow and withheld the service of the summons 



74 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

that he might complete his self-imposed and gracious -task. The 
cancerous growth in his throat made the suffering intense and in 
time speech became impossible. He never murmured : his calm- 
ness and steadiness were as sure as ever : his heart grew yet warmer 
to his people, his mind yet clearer upon the enduring interests of 
his country, as he went on with his writing. And as he wrote of 
reconciliation between the sections and the factions, the old bitter- 
ness did give way, the love of all his countrymen gathered around 
him, and the people became united in a common sorrow. 

To his physicians he expressed the hope that they could be instru- 
mental in prolonging his life that he might finish his work. As he 
worked, the last act of the Forty-eighth Congress created for him 
anew the grade of General in the army, which he had vacated upon 
his accession to the presidency, and the final act of President 
Arthur's administration placed him in it. In all this, partizanship 
receded and was stilled. With one accord the people of all sections 
and all opinions demanded it. His • life was prolonged until his 
task was finished. He closed the book with the words, " Man pro- 
poses, but God disposes." It was his last will. It ensured his 
family a competency. It gave to his country a noble example, a 
benediction, and an inspiration. It was all he had to give. But it 
was much. It was more than any other of his generation could 
give. With work finished, he waited the end with composure and 
with confidence, and the thought of all the people gathered at the 
cottage on the mountain top to await the end. 

On the morning of July 23, 1885, on my usual walk to daily duties 
in the capital of the nation, I had stopped a moment, as was my 
wont, to admire the beautiful equestrian statue of McPherson, the 
gallant commander of the Army of the Tennessee, whose life was 
given to his country before Atlanta. There was a sharp stroke by 
the fire alarm on the city's bells. I looked up to the flag on the 
Treasury Department, and instantly it dropped half way down the 
staff. Looking at my watch it was 8.24; and I knew that but a 
moment before the light had flickered out on Mt McGregor, that a 
devoted husband and father had passed out of a loving family circle, 
that a great national character had passed on to the inexorable 
judgment of history, and that a kingly spirit which had put itself 
at peace with all the world was at one with the hereafter. 

We knew before today that General Grant had the gift of military 
genius. The ground over which the hour has carried us must 
have illustrated the fact that he had other qualities which were very 
great. They by no means made for strife ; they by no means pointed 
to war. They were factors in civic as well as in military leadership. 



INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 75 

Sincerity, genuineness, gentleness, patience, steadiness, judgment, 
force, endurance, self-respect and patriotism were inborn qualities 
of his character, and peace was the best loved word in his 
vocabulary. 

The last public scene in the career of this great captain was not 
what he would have made it, but it was very properly an imposing 
one. The people moved by common impulse to our great city by 
the sea. The offices, and shops, and marts of trade were closed. 
The press, the pulpit, the schools, the clubs, gave expression to the 
universal grief. The army and navy of the United States were 
there in impressive form. The veterans of the Union armies he 
had commanded, and of the Confederate armies he had opposed, 
gathered in fraternal concord, to signify their affectionate and 
patriotic sorrow. The President and his Cabinet ; the Congress ; 
the Supreme Court ; the officers, the legislatures and the militia of 
the states ; and civic organizations without number, joined in the 
long march to the tomb. The cortege reached from the Battery 
to Morningside, and beyond. And through the August heat of 
the great city, through a throng of sorrowing people so great that 
no man could number it, the endless line of civic black and military 
white, and crimson, and blue, and gold, with arms reversed and 
banners draped, with slow music and measured tread, bore the 
mortal remains of Grant to their dignified and historic resting place 
on the banks of the Hudson, to the shade of a great university, and 
to that peace which he had longed for so fondly and had done so 
much to conquer. "Ashes to ashes : dust to dust." He has gone ; 
but the memory of such an one remains and becomes the splendid 
inspiration of the nation, the priceless heritage of the generations 
which follow after. 



FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 

ADDRESS AT THE COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES OF THE ALBANY 
MEDICAL COLLEGE, UNION UNIVERSITY 

Mr Chancellor, Mr Dean, and more especially you, Young Men 
of the Class of 1906: 
You are entering the medical profession. You have had a very- 
substantial preparatory training and have been given about all your 
heads will hold of the theoretical technic and methods of medicine. 
The difference in capacity between now and when you have come 
to be fifty years of age, and the difference in quality between what 
you get through lectures and will get from practice are rather 
delicate matters which I haven't the heart to obtrude upon you in 
the presence of your mothers and sisters, and other fellow's sisters, 
who have come to add to the gaieties of your graduation day. 

Moreover, I am without the knowledge, and trust I am lacking in 
the temerity, to attempt to discuss the technical or scholarly or 
professional side of medicine. Happily it is unnecessary because 
you are so full of theory that you could not absorb more of that 
kind of thing just now. Moreover since assuming the burden of 
this address, and in contemplation of it, I have read a recent maga- 
zine article on the Ebers papyrus, found between the legs of a 
mummy laid away some seven thousand years ago, which shows 
that doctors were earnest if not so common, that diseases were 
about as well known and as well classified, and that the uses of 
drugs were about as well recognized then as now. Instead of aiding 
me, this article has forced me to abandon some contemplated 
observations upon the later history of the medical profession and 
the marvelous progress of modern medicine. But there are some 
things which any intelligent or experienced layman may say which 
ought to command the interest of the medical profession. From a 
point of view outside of the profession, and yet out of an experience 
that no one can say is very brief, and also out of my every day 
official business, some observations ought to be evolved which are 
worthy of your graduation hour and of a moment's thought. 

You are entering into relations with the medical profession. 
What is a profession, anyway? It is an association of persons 
united in spirit because engaged in the same business, occupied 
by the same studies, and moved by the same aims. The business 
can not be performed by mere physical effort, nor indeed by mere 

76 






FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 77 

repetition and copying. It is intellectual business and must rest 
upon a scientific basis. There must be training for it which will 
enable one to recognize somewhat obscure indications, to ascertain 
facts on his own account, to reason logically about them, and to 
come to independent conclusions worthy of the common support 
of all because the conclusions are the inevitable result of man's 
sincere, intellectual, experimental, study of God's unalterable 
truths. Between these persons there must be respect and frater- 
nity: there must be genuineness and generosity. Jealous regard 
for the honor of the gild must control the meannesses which were 
given in some measure to all of us, and genuine enthusiasm for the 
success of the gild's business must travel in double harness with 
earnest desire for the progress of the world's good. Moving and 
inspiring these persons there must be a proud history, stirring 
traditions, time-honored usages, mountain peaks of particular 
achievement, and a literature with substance, flavor, and inspiration 
in it. 

There is no profession with a longer or a more eventful history 
than medicine: there is none marked by such serious study or such 
splendid accomplishment: there is none whose work must not of 
necessity be expressed by tongue or pen which has such a volumi- 
nous literature: there is none upon~which men and women are so 
absolutely dependent ; and there is none so attractive to scoundrels 
and so sheltering to scoundrelism, in spite of all that multitudes 
of anxious physicians and all decent people have seemed able to do. 

Not until recent years has it been deemed necessary in America 
to surround the medical profession with legal safeguards and 
regulations. In all of the leading countries of Europe — England, 
France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Austria-Hungary, 
Greece, Italy, Switzerland, — admissions to the medical profession 
were regulated by law and conditioned upon serious scientific 
training before there was much done in that direction by any 
American state. In all of these countries the conditions of admis- 
sion are probably more exacting now than in any American state. 
In this land of the free, where so many people seem to think that 
nobody is to be prevented from doing anything, the time is very 
distinctly remembered when the very common usage implied that 
holding a doctor's horse, attending the door, and picking up the 
catchwords and forms of medical practice, were about all that was 
needed to qualify one for the legal right to practise in the medical 
profession. The laws, made by the legislatures and laid down by 
the judges, assumed without sufficient reason that the natural 
intelligence and self-interest of the people were all that were neces- 



78 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

sary to protect them from imposition. Not until long after the 
universities had developed medical faculties and these faculties, 
with the more commercial and ephemeral medical schools, had 
turned out many men who were trained in general culture, in 
scientific research, and in practical experience, was the medical 
practice placed upon any lawful or professional footing. 

Nineteen years ago it was my honor and pleasure, as now, to 
make the commencement address to the graduating class of the 
Albany Medical College. At that time only five states in the 
Union exacted an examination for a license to practise medicine. 
The only sure basis of training — graduation from a recognized and 
approved school of medicine — was nowhere insisted upon. Now 
a diploma from a recognized medical college, in addition to a 
licensing examination defined by statute, is required in 26 states. 
In 31 states a medical diploma alone does not confer the right to 
practise, and but eight of these states require nothing more than 
an examination. 

It is not too much to say that in erecting this legal and recog- 
nizable basis for medical practice in America, New York has been 
distinctly foremost among the states. Her experience has shown 
her the necessary steps: she has been the first and gone the furthest 
in taking those steps, and, wherever professional self-respect is 
the keenest and public sentiment is the ripest, other states are 
following her footsteps in the effort to gain her plane. 

And it takes nothing from the great credit which belongs to many 
others to say that the largest single share of honor for this splendid 
advance is due to one whose professional skill and reputation has 
recently led to his advancement to the presidency of the American 
Surgical Association; who is just now on his way from Europe 
where he has been to represent the American medical profession at 
the International Congress of Physicians and Surgeons; who, 
happily, was only last week — and in his absence — again elected a 
Regent of the University of the State of New York by the Legislature 
because of the distinct need which the State has of his service to 
medical learning, — the enthusiastic though gentle guide of the 
Albany Medical College — Dr Albert Vander Veer. 

When we specify the conditions of admission to medical practice 
in New York, we point out the most exacting requirements in 
America. They have been fixed by men of large experience and 
very high ideals in the profession and by courageous men in public 
life who have been willing to follow the best professional leadership. 
All admissions to practice must be upon examination by a state 
board of medical examiners, appointed by and under the supervision 



FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 79 

of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, 
and before one is allowed to take the examination the following 
facts must appear: 

1 He must be 21 years of age. If nature has its course, that is 
easily met. 

2 He must have good moral character. So long as this may 
be proved by the certificates of friends, it will not be difficult. 

3 He must have four years of satisfactory preliminary prepara- 
tion in an approved school of academic grade. This is arbitrary 
and there is no dodging it. 

4 He must have four years of satisfactory work in an approved 
school of medicine. This is also arbitrary and has to be completely 
performed. The specified work in institutions of approved aca- 
demic and professional standards is the all-important advance. 
Plans for establishing a combined college and professional course, 
which will shorten the time one year, are in progress. It is clearly 
desirable that everything be done to economize time and encourage 
the scientific preparation in the universities. Institutions are 
stronger than individuals: organized and public training is more 
substantial than individual and private tutoring. The universities 
train in the fundamental sciences much better than the average 
school of medicine is likely to do. . 

5 He must have the degree of bachelor or doctor of medicine, 
conferred by an approved and registered medical school having 
authority to confer it. 

One who has all these qualifications, and in addition thereto is 
fortified with $25, may enter the State medical examination, and 
if he passes it the board of examiners will certify that fact and 
he will then receive from the Regents of the University a license to 
practise medicine in New York State, which he must register in the 
clerk's office of the county in which he is to try to do business, and 
then he may practise the healing art upon all who think they stand 
in need of it, and will permit him. 

Now it would be wholly unjust to exact all this of our own medical 
schools and our own medical students, and then allow physicians 
and surgeons who have been licensed in other states, where the 
schools are less substantial and the exactions are less severe, to 
come in here on the same plane as our own practitioners. To stop 
this, no one is allowed to come in from another state without exam- 
ination, but the University is authorized to register and recognize 
work in medical schools in other states, and, indeed, in other coun- 
tries, where the minimum graduation standard is not less than that 
fixed by our statutes for New York medical schools, and to admit 



80 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

their graduates to the examination provided they have the other 
qualifications required; and the University may also accept not 
less than five years' reputable practice by a practitioner in another 
state in lieu of both the preliminary and professional training, but 
only to the extent of permitting him to try the examination. 

The statutes also authorize the University to indorse medical 
licenses granted in another state so as to make them good in this 
State, when satisfied that the requirements in the other state are as 
exacting as in this State, and that the other state will reciprocate 
in like manner; but little has yet definitely resulted from this author- 
ity because but one or two states are able to meet our standards 
of requirement. 

The only states with legal standards fixed in the law which permit 
reciprocity are New Jersey and Michigan. We have recently had 
negotiations with New Jersey which have led to an acceptance of 
their medical licenses here and of ours there. Some other advances 
in that direction have been made. Some discussion of the matter 
is now in progress with the medical authorities of Pennsylvania. 
But there must clearly be legislation in Pennsylvania, as in prac- 
tically all other states, before we can accept their licenses. But 
many are moving. At a conference of state medical examining 
and licensing boards held last week at Columbus, O., at which Ohio, 
Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and per- 
haps some other states, were represented, three determinations of 
very considerable importance were reached: 

i It was determined to adopt in the different states the New 
York standards of measurement of preliminary education. The 
term "count" is to be used and is to uniformly mean one recita- 
tion a week for a year in a recognized high school or academy. 

2 It was determined to recommend that a medical student's 
certificate entitling to admission to a professional school shall 
represent 60 counts, 30 of these counts to be in specified subjects, 
of which 10 shall be in English, 10 in mathematics, 5 in Latin and 5 
in physics, with the further provision that after 1908 there shall 
be required 10 counts in Latin. This is of course not enough, 
but it is a fair start. 

3 A committee was appointed to arrange a medical school 
course which shall be at least uniformly required as the basis 
of the medical license, and it was determined that this must em- 
brace bacteriology, histology, embryology, osteology, anatomy, 
physiology, toxicology and chemistry. Again, it must be said 
that this is not enough but it is a good start. 



FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 8l 

All of these determinations were reached with unanimity. These 
conferences and the boards which they represent are without legal 
competency to enforce these determinations, but the best profes- 
sional sentiment is setting rightly in the western states, and 
when those states really start to do a thing they do it very 
abundantly. New York has peculiar satisfaction in seeing her 
policies accepted with such courage in the great central states 
as to promise their general adoption in the nation. 

The New England states are singularly delinquent about state 
standards for admission to the medical profession. The reasons 
are obvious but the fact is likely to stand in the way of inter- 
state professional comity for a considerable time. However, it 
must not be overlooked that there are many medical schools of 
high grade in New England, graduating large numbers of thor- 
oughly trained young men, and it would be manifestly unreason- 
able to doubt that the leaders of the medical profession in 
several of the eastern cities are at least as learned, as skilled and 
as high minded as any in the world. The trouble is not that 
New England is lacking in learned medical men but that she does 
not shut out the ignorant or dishonest ones. 

California, Michigan, New Hampshire (a good and lonely 
exception in the New England States), New Jersey, New York, 
Ohio and Wisconsin are the only states which require a full 
high school course before the medical school and the state 
examination. In the other states the admission requirements 
at the medical schools are very slight. No state requires a col- 
lege course in advance of the professional school, but the schools 
of medicine of Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities do re- 
quire it. In twenty-six states a diploma from a recognized 
medical school must precede and be followed by a state licens- 
ing examination, and in nine other states there must be a 
licensing examination, without the medical school diploma, — 
but of course there are schools and schools, and examinations 
and examinations. 

There are many other statutory provisions, and many penal- 
ties for evading the law in New York which are intended, so far 
as lawmaking can do it, to insure substantial character and 
scientific competency in the medical profession, and to protect 
the people against charlatanism and chicanery and violations of 
the law are now being prosecuted with considerable vigor. 

But I have already given more time to this side of my theme 
than I can afford, for I want to present another. 



82 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Not because of any suspicion that you are not all honorable 
men, but because you hear so much and must needs think so 
much upon the laws which fix the conditions of admission to the 
medical profession, and because the profession claims such excep- 
tional manhood, I must remind you that the wisest laws can only 
protect and can not make a profession, and that he who enters 
here with any expectation of winning honorable place in this pro- 
fession must more than meet the bare demands of the laws. He must 
have plans in his mind and purposes in his heart which will help 
enforce the laws but are wholly above and independent of the law. 

The gist and essence of a learned profession must appear in 
the learning and high mindedness of its members; in their pride 
in its history; in their jealous regard for its good name; in their 
eagerness for their share in the fraternal spirit which pervades 
it, and in their sincere desire and intelligent power to give it 
character and make it serviceable to mankind. No man has any 
right to become a load upon a profession. If he enters one think- 
ing of the commercial advantage it is going to be to him, rather 
than of the inspiration to self-activity he may get out of it, and 
of the support and honor which his hard labor and serious study 
may bring to it, he is wanting in the first and most vital require- 
ments for admission. The services of different men to a pro- 
fession must be very different in kind and extent, but all may 
bring it honor and respect ; and all who are not anxious to do 
that and who w r ill not do valiant battle for it on occasion ought 
to get the benefit of a professional boot at the point where the 
stairway of shame descends to a w r ide back door. 

The medical profession has some special attributes which claim 
particular reflections. If any men ought to exemplify and en- 
force physical, intellectual and moral cleanliness, they are the 
men in the medical profession. They know about aseptic dress- 
ings, and they ought to apply them to themselves. Because he 
is chargeable with a knowledge which recognizes filth at first 
sight, and is bound to stand for health, strength and cleanliness 
at all times and in all things, the doctor who is weak, immoral, 
or unclean becomes a conspicuous and contemptible spectacle 
among men. 

The medical profession is in a special sense a scientific pro- 
fession. It runs down to and rests upon the fundamental and 
exact sciences. It applies them to the highest interests of men. 
There has been too much ignorant and heartrending blundering 
in medical practice by men who claimed an expert knowledge 
which they did not possess. Experience has shown that society 



FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 83 

must protect itself. No amount of scientific training can make 
men honest: a smattering of it seems to make men dishonest, 
for it almost inevitably leads to false pretenses. A frank and 
honest man with no scientific training but a very large practical 
experience is a safer practitioner and a more respectable char- 
acter than one who assumes to base his treatment of injury and 
disease upon a scientific knowledge which every true scientist 
knows is halting, inaccurate, and uncertain. One without a 
very full knowledge of chemistry and bacteriology, and a very 
considerable knowledge of physics and of physiology, zoology, 
histology, and embryology, and one without a sharp nose for 
investigation and without scientific methods which will reach 
down to a foundation that will stand and lead out to conclusions 
that are definite has no business dealing with the serious problems 
of human physical life. 

Young man, you have the fundamentals of scientific knowledge 
and this studious method ; or, if you have not, you have it in you 
to get it ; or, if it is not in you to get it, then you are trying to 
break into the wrong profession. And the very least that the 
medical profession can ask and the public can demand of you is 
that when a sufferer asks your aid you shall with the utmost 
pains and by the fullest physical examination ascertain what 
the trouble is, if it is in you to know, and if it is not that you shall 
claim the assistance of a true pathologist who can find out. When 
you know what the matter is, you will be more likely to know what 
to do to take care of it, and when you do know, proceed with assid- 
uity and courage and exactness and completeness to do it, or claim 
the aid of another who will. If you do not know and if you can not 
do, at least spare people the infliction of any unnecessary lying about 
it, or of any treatment which may be worse than the disease. 

There is much to tempt one into wrong in the medical profession. 
The respect of men and professional success alike depend upon your 
not giving way to it. You will be found out when you do. The 
judgment of a community is intuitive and inexorable. There are 
fussy and fidgety and weak-headed people who enjoy bad health 
and will have no physicians who do not encourage their belief 
that they must necessarily have it. And there are physicians who 
fall in with that sort of thing for the sake of the fees. But such 
physicians have to be content with such patients, for other patients 
do not want them. And where there is one person of that kind 
there is an hundred of the other kind who want health and prefer 
to employ an honest and genuine man who will tell them the truth 
and help them to have health. Of course, a little harmless bam- 



84 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

boozling of an heroic soul may be warranted in a real exigency now 
and then, but the doctor who is fool enough to attempt to bamboozlt 
the wrong man when there is no exigency ought not to complain if 
he pays for his mistake by the loss of his job and the destruction 
of any reputation he may have. You may possibly be forgiven for 
not telling unfortunates that they are as sick as they are ; but if 
you tell people that they are worse than they are, so that if they die 
you will be on the safe side, and if in some way they live you will 
get credit for a miraculous cure, — your over smartness will surely 
find you out. If you fondle and deceive patients in order to 
enlarge your fees you will do your patients a great wrong but you 
will do yourselves a greater wrong because while you are doing it 
you will be polluting your own soul and robbing yourselves of 
ambitious and enlarging reputations. It will be much better in the 
long run to keep in the middle of the road and in company with the 
truth. 

The medical profession is a sympathetic as well as a scientific 
profession. The very soul and spirit of it must spring out of 
human sympathy. As fine traditions as any that have grown out 
of man's experiences are associated with the work of the family 
doctor. There is some reason to fear that he may be passing away. 
The conditions of modern living, the methods of modern business, 
the vast extent of really skilled specialization in medical practice, 
and the growth of hospitals, all tend to commercialize the medical 
profession. In two great buildings directly opposite each other on 
State street in Chicago there are the offices of a thousand doctors. 
They never see the homes of many of their patients, and too many 
of them never see any home life at all for they live in hotels and 
boarding houses themselves. They are excellent men and they are 
better educated than doctors were in other days, but they must miss 
some of the factors which are needful to the harmonious evolution 
of a true physician's life, because that life relates to the homes and 
the family circumstances and relations of his clientele. 

Be true to the men and women who employ you. Don't be gab- 
blers. Keep their secrets and serve them with undivided regard for 
their interests rather than your own. Don't nurse jobs instead of 
patients. Do your work ; do it thoroughly ; be gentle and true, at 
times resolute and decisive ; attend to your business with all the 
expedition you have, and then get out. It will be infinitely the 
better policy. 

It is too bad that people seem so unable to get rid of a doctor' who 
has become a piece of the family bric-a-brac, when they really want 
to. The only national society yet to be organized, which I can 



FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 85 

think of, is one which will give the members courage to get rid of 
physicians of whom they have tired, and who have more nerve than 
they have themselves. If one doesn't like a lawyer he goes to 
another with his next case, but if he doesn't like his physician he 
holds on to him with a sternness which philosophy has never ex- 
plained and experimental psychology has never yet solved. If 
men and women were not so subject to claptrap and pretense, they 
would have better health, pretenders would not be so common nor 
so persistent, and physicians of worth would be more widely recog- 
nized and more uniformly regarded. There is room here for just 
one more philanthropic national organization and we ought all to 
give support to one that would take this good cause in hand. 

It needs no mere theory and no bare logic, to show that science 
and sympathy must go together in the successful practice of medi- 
cine. The life of every successful physician makes it obvious 
enough. The lower ranks of the profession are full of men who 
blunder along and hold on to a weakling or an unfortunate with 
all of the persistence which credulity permits ; but the upper ranks 
of the profession hold the really successful men in whom humane 
sympathy unites with learning to develop the great souls whom 
the world recognizes on the instant and for whom it is always 
eager to remove its hat. The men who are capable of service and 
who are anxious to serve are the only men worthy of recognition 
in the medical profession. 

Help the poor. Do not be imposed upon, but do not withhold 
service because one can not pay. It is not the function of the medical 
profession to regulate fees. Do all the work you can get for what- 
ever you can get and do it just as loyally as you can, whatever the 
pay. It is about all you will be good for for a dozen years. You 
won't be entitled to dictate terms for a good while. If you accept 
this theory you will soon have work, you will grow in skill and 
in repute, and you will in time be able to dictate terms. Don't 
expect to gain the position of an eminent physician or surgeon 
without going through the long, many, hard years of service and 
of anxiety that that man has bravely, studiously and generously 
given to gain learning, skill, eminence and respect. 

And all of us have some sort of a claim upon the most eminent 
and successful medical men, and the quaities that have made those 
men successful lead them to respect it. One who has served who- 
ever called, for small fees or no fees, at all times of day or night, 
and has come to the time when he can do it no longer and must of 
necessity discriminate and may in a way fix his own terms, may no 
longer be bound to respond to every call ; but he is bound to have 



86 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

young men around him who will, and to keep them under his guid- 
ance, and to go himself when the exigency demands it. 

If I can not afford to pay the Dean of this medical college for 
attending me in my distresses and am obliged to take up with one 
so inexperienced as you, I am at least entitled to have Dr Ward 
come in and see me before you let me die without any reason, and 
have him tell you in my presence how well you have been doing, — 
and then take you out in the other room and tell you to stop and 
do something else. 

They tell a story of my friend, Dr Newell Dwight Hillis of 
Plymouth Church, that I do not vouch for but that may easily be 
true. The story is that when Dr Hillis was serving a small church 
in Evanston, Mrs Hillis being desperately sick the young preacher 
called an eminent specialist, Dr John C. Webster, of Chicago, whose 
ministrations were completely successful. Dr Hillis worried about 
the bill and after a little went over and said, " Dr Webster, I can 
not pay you at once but I want to know what your bill is and I will 
soon arrange it. Here is $50. It is all that I can pay now. Money 
can never discharge my debt for such eminent services as yours. 
If you will tell me the amount of your bill so that I may have it in 
mind I will pay it in full just as soon as I can." Dr Webster 
replied, " You keep your money. I owe you as much as you do me 
and doubtless I shall need you as much as you will need me. You 
have made as good in theology as I have in medicine. I would like 
to exchange works with you. I will keep Mrs Hillis out of Heaven 
as long as I can, if you will keep me out of Hell as long as you can.'' 
I can not hope to get in the high station of Dr Hillis but I submit 
that I ought not to be compelled to forego the services of the Dean 
of the Medical College on an exceptional occasion only because he 
may stand in need of more theology than I am able to provide. 

The medical profession is bound to be more than clean and pure 
and square, more than scientific, and more than sympathetic. It 
must be steady, cheerful, courageous, optimistic and confident. It 
is bound to put courage into people to the end that doctor and 
patient may work together in meeting exigencies and finding the 
way back to normal health. Half the worth of half the doctors is 
in their buoyant and bracing temperaments. 

The medical profession is more than all that : it is a patriotic pro- 
fession. It is expert upon the principles which the state must 
observe to be healthful, and concerning the practices which society 
must prevent if we are to live in crowded settlements with any 
degree of comfort and safety. We look to this profession to set up 
the machinery which may assure the common hnlth and to provide 



FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 87 

schools, laboratories and hospitals, always expensive, which will 
make modern scientific knowledge available to the mass and meet 
the needs of the many who must inevitably be overtaken by acci- 
dent and disease under the swiftly moving and dangerous conditions 
of our complex life. 

You are entering an ancient, a learned and an honorable profes- 
sion. It is a profession which lays equal claim upon the funda- 
mental sciences and the manly virtues. It is distinguished by the 
fact that it is itself largely responsible for the marvelous scientific 
advance of the last generation. It is filled with sympathy and gener- 
osity. It is a courageous and patriotic profession. It attracts 
scoundrels and is often used to shelter meanness and vice. It is 
a laborious profession. • You will have to earn your bread in the 
sweat of your brows and you will have to win any fame you get by 
a nobility of purpose that will stand all tests, by study which will 
keep you at the front of the scientific advance, and by zeal for service 
which always opens the door of opportunity. You have just as high 
rights as any body. Do not fear. Take your self-confidence in 
your hand. The outcome is with you. You will have to elect and 
you will do it soon. You will stumble along in uncertainty, think- 
ing much of yourself, wondering why you are not appreciated, and 
soon coming to mediocrity out of which you can never rise ; or you 
will at once give yourselves up to a splendid service and in time 
bring honor to a great profession. No one is going to plead with 
you or stay with you forever to get you to do it. If you haven't got 
fiber and force enough to move out and up on your own account, 
there are plenty of others who have. And they are the ones who are 
entitled to the world's best help because they have got it in them 
to help the world. 



ABSTRACT OF REMARKS AT NEW YORK STATE 
GRANGE, 1906, AT GENEVA, N. Y. 

More than seventy per cent of the people of this State are living 
in cities. New York city is doubling in size in thirty years. This 
means that city interests and theories are likely to predominate in 
the political, social, religious and industrial life of the State. Then 
farmers will have to readjust themselves. 

Our State agriculture is waking up. The splendid advance in 
dairying, in truck farming — particularly on Long Island, in fruit 
culture — particularly in western New Y r ork, in flowers and orna- 
mental plants, and in the canning of fruits and vegetables, is all very 
encouraging. But agriculture does not wake up as fast as the other 
businesses of the State. 

We have a State that can do anything. There is no good rea- 
son why the New York farmers should let the western farmers 
carry much more than corn and wheat past their doors to the great 
eastern markets. Why do we not raise more beef cattle, more 
draft horses, more sheep and more swine for New York, Phila- 
delphia and Boston and for Europe? If it is said that it is because 
of lack of feed, it may be answered that the State can raise any- 
thing. The fault is not so much with the farms as with the 
farmers. If the farmers do not know how to do it, the Agri- 
cultural Experiment Station and the Agricultural College must tell 
them. 

What is needed is farming on a larger scale, a better chemi- 
cal knowledge of the soils and a closer adaptation of crops to 
soils, a better understanding of the demands of the markets, good 
relations with the railroads, and more courage. The Agricultural 
Experiment Stations serve every farmer in the Mississippi valley. 
There is none in the country better than the one here in Geneva. 
It is anxious to serve. The only uncertainty is about the anxiety 
of the farmers to make use of it. 

Farming, the success or failure of it, has much to do with the 
farmer, with the manner of his life and that of his wife and 
children, with his intelligence, and with his happiness. If New 
York farmers can make more money they will have better schools. 
With railroads, and trolleys, and telephones, and newspapers, and 
the daily free delivery of mails, the farmers ought to have better 
homes and quite as good schools as the people in the cities 

88 



REMARKS AT NEW YORK STATE GRANGE, 1906, GENEVA N, Y. 89 

have. There must be not only a good elementary school within 
walking distance of every farmhouse, but a good high school within 
easy driving distance of it. The little roadside schools must be 
connected with village high schools. The supervisory district must 
be so small that a superintendent can visit each country school 
once a month and that the teachers can all come together for in- 
struction as often. 

All the people of the State are to live together. We are to live 
and help live. Every resident of New York city has interest in 
the prosperity of every New York farmer. The reverse should be 
true also. Farmers must dispel prejudices and get rid of old routine 
that does not fit new conditions. Cooperation, not criticism, is' 
the essence of modern success. There is no greater State in the 
Union. Look at her history, her splendid commercial situation, 
her wealth and her opportunities. Let all the people work together 
to make the most of these things. Those who do will make most 
headway for themselves. 



THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

Reprinted from Appleton's magazine by courtesy of Messrs D. Appleton 

& Co. 

Americans are ever ready to try out new propositions. Not 
many Americans are very discriminating about projects. The 
spirit of the country is not satisfied until suggestions have been 
put to the practical test. If individual and personal initiative is 
needed, any number of people will supply it; if public action is 
necessary, nearly everybody will support it. As individuals, and 
even more as a people, we are bound to get all of the possibilities 
out of all the things we chance to think of. Our native energy 
and common optimism are ever disposed to experiment, and our 
free-flowing democracy and our much legislation make it easy 
enough to do so. If something results we are very happy for we 
have made an addition to our already very good collection of 
national assets; if nothing results there is no harm — we have had 
the fun which we get out of experimenting, and the laugh which 
we associate with failure. It all stimulates productivity. It puts 
a premium upon the novel; but it makes headway and brings out 
great results. Our energy and our optimism are valuable national 
properties. They lead us into some passing blunders, but they 
give us many enduring results. 

It is strikingly so in matters educational. It is the intention of 
the people who control the destiny of the United States to do every- 
thing, to try out every manner of experiment, which may raise the 
common level of intelligence and enlarge the opportunity of the 
boy or girl, the man or woman, in the crowd. It comes pretty 
near being the national religion. It leads to some incidental 
absurdities, but to more very striking and permanent advances. 

There is apparently some growing doubt in the land about all 
men being created equal. There is even some skepticism about 
the laws being wholly without favor, or at least about their being 
administered so that the rights of all are exactly alike ; but there is 
no doubt whatever of the common determination that every 
American boy or girl shall have his or her full opportunity through 
an absolute equality of right to an education. That, at least, has 
by the common impulse become the first law of our land. The 
sense of proprietorship in the educational system is universal, and 
the purpose to make that system the widest and the best in the 
world is not at all obscure. 

... 9° ..... . . % 



THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 91 

The early thought of the nation about education — the thought 
which our English forefathers brought from over the sea — has 
complet' ly changed. It is not something good which government is 
to encourage, but something vital which government must provide. 
And the government which is to provide it must of necessity be 
sovereign as well as local and administrative. The educational 
system is no longer a system which shall supply the elements of 
knowledge or the primary instruments for gaining knowledge, 
but a system which is expected to supply all the knowledge which 
any son or daughter of the State has the preparation and the will 
to come and take. It no longer acts through schools alone, but 
through libraries, museums, clubs, lectures, publications, and all 
other instrumentalities which may possibly raise the level of the 
intellectual plane. 

And when so much in every direction is being attempted at 
public expense, through officials who are not always experienced 
and who get no credit for being conservative, there must be a good 
deal of commotion much of the time, and no little uncertainty 
about the net results. 

Teachers and other professional managers naturally respond to 
the popular impulse ; not a few of them capitalize it. When the 
vox populi uniformly sounds an advance, when the educational 
associations are ravenous for something new to discuss, when the 
daily newspapers discriminate in favor of things that are novel, 
when celebrity is dependent upon proposing something out of the 
ordinary, teachers, like other classes of our resourceful fellow 
countrymen, are not likely to be weighed in the balance and found 
wanting. And it must be admitted that they enjoy it. Even if 
discussion and agitation do not bring forth results that are lasting, 
they supply the intellectual pastime which teachers sorely need. 
But propositions and projects are not tendencies. Even dis- 
cussions which entertain for an interminable time and movements 
which take forever to come to something or nothing, are not trends, 
but only persistencies, in education. The national character goes 
on unfolding in its own exclusive and imperial way. It adopts 
and adapts what can enlarge and enrich the soul of the Republic: 
all the rest comes to naught. American education accepts and 
incorporates what can add to the intellectual stores, the mental 
culture, the philosophical sense, and the industrial productivity 
of a free people ; the rest is forgotten. 

One can not traverse the last twenty-five years of American 
educational progress without seeing many developments which 
are so substantial and decisive, and withal so completely accom- 



92 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

plished, that they must have become permanent. That period has 
been marked by truly marvelous advances, not only in the pro- 
fessional but in the common thought of the nation. It is not too 
much to say that no such educational advance has been made in 
all the other history of democratic government and of the English- 
speaking race. So rapidly and confidently has universal education 
moved in this country and in our generation that the outlines of 
the national educational system of the future begin to appear. 

A very distinct differentiation of the schools into elementary, 
secondary and higher grades, for the purpose of administration, 
is going forward. The professional mind is making it and the lay 
mind is accepting it. It is advantageous to each grade of schools 
because it puts each upon its own ground and holds each to its own 
responsibilities. It makes educational values more stable and 
constant, and it fixes standards capable of wider use. It discredits 
pretenders and helps to clear away popular confusion. 

In the last thirty or thirty-five years the system of collegiate 
schools has advanced in numbers, in character, in attendance, in 
the multiplicity of offerings, and in the measure of public support 
and popular interest, to an extent which is alike surprising and 
gratifying to educationists. The college system is giving far more 
uplift and direction to all schools than the people realize. True 
as to all parts of the country, this is most emphatically true in the 
newer parts where democracy has little to hamper it, where new 
institutions have not come into conflict with older ones which had 
pretty good rights to the ground and could neither give way nor 
easily change in character, theory, spirit, relations, or outlook. 
The sure trend of our educational system is certainly more clearly 
apparent in # the newer states where both the national and state 
governments have freedom and disposition to cooperate with ex- 
ceedingly ambitious people who are setting up new institutions. 
It is particularly true concerning institutions of advanced grade 
which are providing a general rather than a local service. 

Of course no unfavorable implications are cast upon the eastern 
and older colleges. Indeed, it is doubtless true that some of them 
are entitled to more credit for having broken away from educa- 
tionally hide-bound constituencies and supposedly settled theories, 
for having accepted the guidance of liberal and masterful leaders, 
and for having possessed the courage and asserted the freedom 
necessary to wider service, than the western pioneers — with a 
necessarily wider because a later outlook and with less hindrances 
than the eastern pioneers — are for drawing upon the world's later 
experiences and making at first hand, controlling, supporting and 



THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 93 

shaping to their own ends what the country most needs in the way 
of both upper and lower schools. 

Any substantial uplift in a system of education must come from 
above. Any great improvement or advance in a class of schools 
must come from a class of schools higher up. This fact is now 
actually coming to be recognized by the lower schools themselves 
in America, and that of itself is giving unwonted trend and charac- 
ter to the national school system. But it necessarily follows that 
the factors which enter into the scheme and give turns to the plans 
of the upper schools exert a very strong influence upon the kind 
of uplift and the direction of the development which those schools 
give to the middle and lower schools. 

In the older states three or four of the better colleges of our 
fathers have in the last generation developed into leading univer- 
sities with most of the faculties which educational traditions and 
modern philosophical and material development make needful. 
In the meantime the other earlier colleges are getting their ratings 
and finding their real work in a somewhat exclusive field, but 
finding new satisfaction in occupying that field with added useful- 
ness and honor. And many new institutions have been established, 
to fall into one class or another of the higher institutions. The 
stronger of these institutions in a very great measure, and the 
others in some measure, are giving tone and breadth to our national 
scholarship. But on the whole it must be said that they are doing 
this through their graduates, through our professional and business 
affairs, through the teachers they have trained for other colleges 
and universities, rather than through any very direct bearing 
which they have had upon the lower schools. They have sustained 
no organic, nor indeed any very sympathetic, connection with 
lower schools and their main influence upon the middle schools has 
had reference to getting students for themselves and to having 
them prepared to meet their own circumstances and their particu- 
lar demands. Not more than two or three of the older universities > 
of which Harvard and Columbia are conspicuous examples, have 
provided substantial offerings in educational science and adminis- 
tration, or really undertaken in a rational way to study, to train 
teachers for, or to give energy and direction to the schools below 
them. With these very rare exceptions, the older universities and 
colleges have given only very indirect and disjointed, and often 
very self-interested, aid to the primary and secondary school 
systems which have been maturing very rapidly and substantially 
all around them. 

In all states west of New York and Pennsylvania, and in many 



94 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

of the southern states, a distinctly new class of advanced institu- 
tions has grown up. In many cases they came into being before 
the Civil War, and often they were established and provided with 
revenues by the state Constitutions. In several instances the 
state universities already established were given the federal grants 
of common lands and public moneys for research; in other cases 
these grants resulted in new institutions of the more distinctly 
agricultural and mechanical type. With or without this aid, the 
state universities began to enlist the enthusiastic interest and 
financial support of the people of their states in the seventies and 
eighties, which became even more decisive in the nineties, and has 
now gone so far as to completely assure not only their continuance 
but their continually enlarging and absolutely decisive influence 
upon all of the educational activities of their states. 

If we were to name twenty of the largest American universities, 
counting by buildings, equipment, faculties, revenues, offerings, 
libraries and attendance, fully fifteen of them would be state 
universities. Several of these have faculties numbering from three 
hundred to five hundred teachers, representing every culturing, 
professional, philosophical and industrial interest of our widely 
diversified modern education; and their student bodies often include 
from three thousand to five thousand people. Their assured sup- 
port in popular sympathy and public money is alike munificent 
and magnificent. Several have conferred more than a thousand 
degrees each at their recent June commencements. Their gradu- 
ates are of course most numerous in their own states, but they are 
not unknown in any part of the country, nor indeed in any part of 
any country where something worth while is going on. . 

The influence of Columbia and Harvard and Yale and some 
others upon these western universities will always be gratefully 
admitted, but that should not disguise the fact that they have 
individuality, purpose and outlook very thoroughly their own. 
Refraining from comparisons — as idle as odious — it is moderate to 
say that in ambition and energy, in the variety of their work and 
the plane of their standards, in the seriousness and the democratic 
resourcefulness of their students and the steadily augmenting 
power of their graduates, and particularly in what they are doing 
for the industrial development and the sane thinking of the coun- 
try, they have come to give a decisive trend to the future of Ameri- 
can education. 

To bring out the special bearing of this work, under the particu- 
lar environing influences, on literary culture, on the political 
sciences, on scientific research, on law, medicine and architecture, 



THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 95 

on all lines of engineering, and upon the constructive and agricul- 
tural industries, very much might be justly said. But we must 
now be content with briefly pointing out its relations to the middle 
and the lower schools. 

In all parts of the country the secondary schools have become 
an integral part of the public educational system. In all of the 
Central, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific states the universities have 
also become a part of that system. In the East the public school 
system has twelve grades ; in the West it has sixteen. The extent 
to which the university has become a part of the common school 
system may be seen from the following bare statements: (a) It 
lays out the courses for the high schools, (b) It supplies a very 
considerable part of the high school teachers, (c) It inspects the 
high schools regularly by its own officer, (d) It admits students 
to the university without examination, from approved high schools, 
and under the stimulus of popular demand all of the high schools 
must become worthy of approval, (e) The university takes a 
keen interest in elementary school questions and is an ever present 
influence in the teachers associations. (/) It makes the common 
schools the laboratories of its education department, (g) It re- 
sponds to all popular demands and becomes a potent factor in 
determining educational legislation and shaping educational policy. 
(h) It is free and all ambitious eyes are turned toward it; it is 
popular and all boys and girls in the high schools think about 
going to it. (i) It naturally comes to be looked upon as belong- 
ing to all the people and as the responsible head and guide of the 
public educational system. 

Of course, this affects the university itself as much as the rest 
of the system, and again of course, it brings out a university suited 
to the needs of a busy, prosperous and ambitious people, who want 
the best in the world educationally and are determined to make 
very free use of their power to have it. In other words, it is bring- 
ing out in our- states a new style of university which is already 
giving decisive trend to the national system of education. And a 
process which has gone so far in all the states save a half dozen 
seems likely to be adopted in every state where existing universi- 
ties do not meet every need at a nominal cost. In newer and older 
states it is sure to become yet more decisive in its influence. 

Again let it be said that in all this there is no element of implica- 
tion against the older universities or the literary colleges, which 
find all the work which they can do thoroughly and well. In- 
heriting much from European thought and forms, shaped by 
American conditions when classical training was the sum and 



96 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

professional employments the goal of college work, they have 
aided and been themselves influenced by the development of a 
distinctly new class of institutions of higher learning, which have 
been obliged by the democratic advance in political science and 
industrial prosperity to defy both English and German models, 
train for both scholarship and character, and provide practically 
free instruction in any study to any qualified person. 

If one will realize that this great and popular university develop- 
ment within the public educational system is universal in the 
states which embrace the centers of population, of industrial pro- 
ductivity, and of political control in our country, one will be able 
to appreciate something of the overwhelming trend which it is 
giving to our education. There is nothing like it anywhere in the 
world, for there are no other political institutions which must give 
every one his chance; there is no other nation which realizes so 
keenly that its true greatness depends upon making the most of 
every individual unit, without regard to sex, or circumstances of 
birth, or church associations; and there is no other people with 
whom education comes so near being an absolute and universal 
passion. 

Passing now from what seems to be the overwhelming trend in 
our comprehensive system of education, namely the development 
and diffusion of the higher learning as an integral part of the system 
of common schools, let us inquire about the more specific results 
of this and some associate influences which are operating in our 
intellectual affairs. 

Our entire system of schools, higher and lower, is moving toward 
resourcefulness, to the training which fits one for successful living 
in our complex civilization. The mere rudiments which enable 
a child to read and write are far from sufficient in the elementary 
schools, and the linguistic studies which are merely culturing, in the 
old sense of the term, are no longer in the highest favor in the 
advanced schools. The early ideals are passing away. The little 
child must be trained to see, to think, to do, and to express him- 
self; the college student must get the knowledge, the purpose, the 
power, the steadiness, and the endurance which accomplish sub- 
stantial results, through mental or manual labor. Culture which 
gains recognition in this country must be more than skin-deep and 
must come from the reactionary discipline of work upon the work- 
man. 

The trend of our higher education, up to the present generation, 
was toward respectable polish for the idle rich, and toward some 
preparation for the learned professions. The trend of our higher 



THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 97 

education now is toward a much better preparation for the pro- 
fessions and toward very complete preparation for all of the skilled 
employments, all of the constructive industries, and all of the com- 
mercial activities. 

The more complete preparation for the professions has arisen 
from within the professions themselves and has resulted very 
largely .from legislation limiting admissions to the professions. It 
is but just to say that in this the State of New York has been fore- 
most. In requiring (a) four years' satisfactory work in an approved 
school of academic grade ; (b) four years' satisfactory work in an 
approved professional school, with the bachelor's degree from an 
institution duly empowered to confer it, as conditions for admis- 
sion to the State licensing examination, and (c) in sharply limiting 
the use of the terms college and university, New York has given 
real trend to professional education and professional standards, 
which many of the states about her are happily beginning to 
adopt. 

In this connection it would be a mistake to omit mention of the 
decisive tendency to prepare for the professions in professional 
schools which are associated with the universities, rather than in 
offices or in independent institutions. This has led many inde- 
pendent professional schools to seek alliances with universities. 
It is surely making both the preliminary and professional training 
much stronger and it is leading a much larger number of students 
to more thorough training than they would otherwise get. When 
we recall how recently there was little preparation, either scholastic 
or technical, for the professions in America, and how superficial 
much of the training in independent schools by lecturers who were 
carrying on regular practice has been, we have special satisfaction 
in realizing the extent and excellence of the work which the univer- 
sities are now doing for professional learning and expertness in 
America. 

The aggressive work of the universities, other than that which 
is in preparation for the learned professions, has come to be in the 
courses which are fundamental in administration and in the most 
successful carrying on of the commercial activities and the con- 
structive and manufacturing industries. There is large demand 
for training in the chemistry which enters into agricultural and 
manufacturing activities, in all lines of engineering, in the econom- 
ics of productivity and trade, and in the technic of all the businesses 
which follow after them. There is more demand also for the 
basic work of the political sciences. The demand is the largest 
where the equipment and teaching are the best. Of course this 



98 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

all relates back to and shapes the courses in the high schools, and 
in some measure in the elementary schools. 

It is doing more than causing the lower schools to prepare stu- 
dents for the higher schools. It is developing a rather common 
belief in the crowd that a university which does little besides berate 
the krwer schools about suitably training students for itself, is not 
doing overmuch for education; that young people must be trained 
for subordinate places in business and for manual skill in the trades 
as well as for the colleges and for positions claiming deep scientific 
knowledge; that the high schools have not yet accomplished all 
they ought in this direction, and that there is something lacking 
in the way of training the masses of children in the elementary 
schools for efficiency and contentment in the situations in life 
which they are likely to occupy; that something in the way of 
public trade schools must be established for the children of the 
masses at a rather early age, and that the universities and colleges 
are called upon to recognize that fact and help realize it. In a 
word, the very development of the higher learning is creating the 
common thought that more must be done for the elementary 
learning, that not so much is being done for those who do not go to 
college as for those who do, and that more must be done to adapt 
the training of the masses to probable environment and to the 
inevitable conditions of hand labor and other self-respecting and 
useful employments. 

One of the most gratifying developments of recent years in 
school administration relates not -more to the better understand- 
ings and the warmer friendships between schools of different 
grades than between public and private schools, and between 
schools in one section of the country with those in another. Presi- 
dents and principals and superintendents and teachers are begin- 
ning to learn that one gets rich in education not by withholding 
but by giving, and that prosperity attends an institution which 
knows enough to adhere to its own business when it ought and to 
aid other institutions when it may. This knowledge is propa- 
gating deeper mutual respect and closer fraternal regard. Coopera- 
tion, rather than competition, is coming to be the policy of the 
schools. 

This growing disposition toward mutual helpfulness recognizes 
no state lines or other political boundaries. It is indifferent to 
provincialism, to sectarianism, to polities, and to all other forms 
of exclusiveness. That there is a "democracy of learning" which 
embraces men and women who live in every state and every land, 
and which gives its ennobling inspiration to persons of every class 



THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 99 

or race, or church or party, and which is going to aid every intellec- 
tual and moral interest of mankind at every opportunity, is coming 
to be known wherever there are men and women who are moved 
by the spirit which God has placed in every human breast. It is 
making the widest, the finest, the most inspiring, and the most 
influential fraternity that the world has ever known. 

In later years there has been a very significant enlargement of 
the understanding that the true functions of a democratic state 
justify it in entering upon divers educational activities outside of 
the schools. It is coming to be accepted without cavil that the 
state may not only build up a state library for the use of state 
officials, legislators and judges, but a state library for the aid of 
the professions, or for any other interest which may be aided by a 
collection of books which it can not itself easily secure or maintain ; 
that books may be loaned from the state library to any one needing 
them; that local libraries are to be encouraged, subsidized and 
guided ; and that traveling libraries may be sent about the state to 
quicken study in every direction. This tendency goes beyond 
libraries: it extends to museums and all collections which may 
interest and instruct the crowd; it is very jealous of original his- 
toric manuscripts and mementos ; it sends standard pictures to the 
schools- and all manner of institutions, and it gives helps to art 
centers, reading circles, study clubs, lecture assemblies, and all 
other intellectual activities whether they are individual or asso- 
ciated. 

The tendency is going yet further. It is extending scientific 
research to matters concerning the public health, and even to 
commercial and industrial activities. It would extend every 
facility to sane and logical thinking and to all rational doing. 
One state erects laboratories for the chemical, microscopical, and 
bacterial examination of diseased tissue; another analyzes all 
drinking water sent to its scientific laboratories and determines 
whether or not the specimens are free from contamination ; another 
conserves the animals in its forests and propagates the fishes in its 
waters; another works up its clays into forms both useful and 
beautiful; another measures the carbon in its coals; another tells 
its farmers how to add to the potentiality of their acres and what 
crops will command the readiest markets; and yet another shows 
its railroads how to get a maximum of speed and hauling power at 
a minimum of cost. All this and much more is going on — often 
all of these things, and more, in the same state. The tendency is 
growing rapidly. It seems destined to give even more decisive 
turns to the future of our education and our civilization. 



IOO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

The truly significant thing about it is that the more and the 
better it is done the stronger is the popular support. There is no 
socialism or paternalism about it. It is merely the outworking of 
the fundamental American doctrine that in education the masses 
have the same right of opportunity as the classes. It is using the 
combined political power to gain the educational results in a short 
time which without that power a few favored people may get in a 
long time, and often keep to themselves for a yet longer time. It 
is all illustrative of the inherent spirit of the country and of the 
roads which that spirit is bound to break out and follow. 

The growing culture as well as the ever developing business of 
the country is quickly reflected in our schools. There is no country 
in which the changes are so frequent and the accumulations so 
apparent, and the progress so rapid; and there is none in which all 
this so quickly affects the situations and policies of the schools. 
This is well illustrated in the architecture and the multiplying 
adornments of the newer school buildings at nearly all of the 
centers of population. It appears also in the art courses which 
are making their way into the programs of the schools. The great 
wealth of the country which embellishes and cultures so many 
homes does the same for the schools — with this difference, that 
the influence of it is even more widely and sanely exerted in the 
schools than in the homes, because the schools are not so likely to 
be inherited by the superficial and idle rich, with all that is implied 
thereby. The schools are, in a way, becoming more and more the 
accumulating and distributing points of the country's culture as 
well as of the country's justice and prosperity. 

Of course, the large fortunes are producing some excessive and 
unwholesome luxury in the life at some of the universities, but 
there is no more democratic and leveling institution in the world 
than an American university, and the ,5 students who use their 
wealth grossly and live riotously are no less likely to lose standing 
in the common sentiment of the crowd than they are to meet their 
fate in the semester examinations. 

The physical training which is now required very uniformly of 
the mass of college students, and the extent to which sports have 
been organized are giving manifest turns to our newer education. 
There is a new respect for health and a new enthusiasm for physical 
accomplishment. There is a new valuation upon sport and a 
wider interest in keeping it clean. The whole thing is doing much 
to attract youth to the high schools and colleges and is exercising 
an unmistakable influence upon the life in the elementary schools. 
Of course there are and will be excesses, but on the whole the in- 



THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION IOI 

fluence is good. Children endure pain with less whimpering; life 
in the open is not only generating new power but creating new 
ideals ; and the thinking of young people in both city and country 
grows more sane and ambitious through the striking development 
of physical training in the schools and of organized interscholastic 
sport. 

No one can foresee the destiny of the Republic, but that there is 
an educational purpose abroad in the land which has never before 
been so pervasive and so ambitious in any land seems clear. It 
is the spirit of a mighty people, gathered from the ends of the 
earth, enlightened by the world experiences of a thousand years. 
It is the spirit of a people with outlook and expectancy. They 
expect to use the wealth and the political power of the nation to 
make certain that every son and daughter of the nation shall have 
the fullest and freest educational opportunity. The functions of 
the state concerning every manner of educational activity, in and 
out of the schools, are being steadily enlarged and strengthened 
through the initiative or the common desire of the multitude. 
Growing appreciation is giving greater heed to the advanced insti- 
tutions and bringing them to the aid of all institutions and there- 
fore to the intellectual quickening of the entire country. Every- 
thing that the nation, the state or the municipality can do to aid 
true learning, without any injustice, it is to be made to do. And 
the learning which aids doing and the culture which is the product 
of labor are to be of the most worth. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 845 557 ft 




